if something is uploaded in "file upload" field in a form, can it be sent as an attachment in email service task?
You don't need a Find Entry activity, the files can be downloaded as part of Retrieve Forms Content. Then you can use the File attachment property in the Email activity However, it is not currently possible to collect them all into a single email with the built-in activities.
I have configured an upload field in a Form for a customer, but for some reason, when I include the field variable in an E-mail Task, I merely get the name of the attached document(s) instead of the actual attachment(s).
I understand that if I assign it to a person as a task, the uploaded files can be downloaded from the Inbox view, but this would require a license and unnecessary effort by the recipient.
Alternatively, I could send it to Laserfiche Workflow, but that feels like an unnecessary amount of work per attachment field to try and get a file emailed as an attachment to a recipient.
Is this a current limitation of Forms? Or did I miss an option / checkbox somewhere?
Thanks team!
Apologies for posting this elsewhere, but I had already read this thread and felt as it was not an appropriate solution for our customers it deserved its own thread.
So as you've locked my question, I'll put the question here instead..
Can someone clarify, if this is a limitation, and whether or not it is going to be fixed?
Our customers who are using Laserfiche Forms are prohibited from accessing Laserfiche Workflow (for obvious reasons), so the suggested method in this thread is an unacceptable solution in order to attach files to an email when using an attachment field.
Thanks team.
so i tried a simple workflow to retrieve laserfiche forms content, find entry, and email. i might be missing something but i receive the email but i dont receive any attachments. i tried entering the token for file upload but nothing was attached, i tried sending as zip and pdf nothing, i also added download electronic document but no attachments. so what im wondering is what piece am i missing for the attachments?
You don't need a Find Entry activity, the files can be downloaded as part of Retrieve Forms Content. Then you can use the File attachment property in the Email activity However, it is not currently possible to collect them all into a single email with the built-in activities.
Hi Miruna,
Is it possible yet with the current releases of Forms and Workflow to be able to attach multiple files to an email via a Workflow activity, or is this functionality still not available and needs to be configured via the parallel "For Each" file workflow suggested by Chris?: https://answers.laserfiche.com/questions/68962/Append-two-or-more-electronic-files-in-the-same-mail-using-workflow
Thanks,
Mike
When I attempt to perform this, I don't get the option to attach the file. See here...
that worked perfectly!!! thank you so much.......
100% of the "answers" invoke using WorkFlow. So does that mean that you can't use Forms (and NOT WORKFLOW) to email any attached files?
Hi John,
Back in 2014/2015 it was not natively possible in Forms. In LF10 / LF11 it is absolutely possible to include the contents of an attachment field (or fields) to almost any 'message' activity in the Form process modeller.
So, for example the "Send Email" activity allows you to attach the form or specify attachments that you want to include. This same functionality is available to "Task Notification Emails" as well.
Note the following limitations on the native functionality:
1) If you need a specific file to be attached to the email, configure your upload field to only allow a single attachment. Email activities have no conditional logic or filtering. It will attach everything uploaded to the forms field to the email. So it is better to configure a field for each important upload. e.g. "Contract Upload Field", "Direct Debit Upload Field", "Proof of Address Upload Field". That way you can directly specify what you want attached to an email.
2) Most email systems fail to send if attachments are greater than 10mb. Be sure to limit the file size of the attachment (at the file upload field level) unless you can guarantee your email system can send emails with attachments over "x mb" in size, and your recipients can recieve emails with attachments over "x mb" in size.
3) It is not possible to format the file names or do any type of merging without passing out to Laserfiche Workflow. What is uploaded is literally what is attached to the email.
4) While not directly related to email, if you choose to use the "Save to Repository" function for your form, keep in mind that it is not currently possible to pick and choose which attachments are saved. It defaults to forcing you to save all attachments even if the upload fields were for display/review/approval purposes only.
--
While I might make it sound like there are a lot of limitations, the inbuilt functionality actually works for 95% of use cases and the situations I mentioned above are just things that can be limiting if you can only work within Forms.
@kris THANKS!!!! I will check with our infrastructure team and see what the filesize limit is in our systems. 10MB is small for our use case.
@████████, I am not seeing this functionality in the drop down lists for 'Attach Form' in my 'Email Service Task'. Can you point me in the right direction to be able to attach existing file upload files?
Thanks!
Hi @████████in the email service task, where you define the parameters of the email, there is a section after the "subject" where you can attach anything that was uploaded into a form by specifying the variable name. Works with single fields or fields within collections. It's a little confusing because immediately below this "Attachment" section is a completely UNRELATED checkbox that says "Attach Form".... not very intuitive ;)
BTW another clever way to share files is to use a cloud drive such as Dropbox, OneDrive or GoogleDrive. You can put a file in a folder there and create a link to it. We've switched to using this method whenever possible because you can set expiration dates and passwords to access files. We changed many "upload file" fields to simple multi-line fields so a user can just paste the link to the file. In the email, it shows up as a clickable hyperlink which is sweet :)
Hope that helps.
thank you very much! You know I searched for the word 'attach' and 'attachment' through the help files and didn't see anything.
Hello Armando,
The attachment can be sent as an email attachment, but not quite how you described it. Instead of the email service task, you would use a Workflow service task.
The workflow that you invoke would include a Retrieve Laserfiche Forms activity, then pass the token for the file upload to an email activity in Workflow. If you anticipate multiple files coming in through the File Upload field, you'll want to use a For Each File activity.
Try this out and let me know if you have any questions!