Can fields in a Form be pre-populated by data from a third party database
From my understanding of what you just said, yes that should be possible. You should be able to perform a database lookup to populate any fields on the form. The user can then input their own information and update information that was pulled from the database. Once the form is submitted, the forms process would kick off a Workflow that would write the information back to the database.
Yes, they can. You will need to setup the third party database as a data source. See here.
a follow up question then - can fields from the LF Form be updated to a third party database.
Here's a scenario:
we develop a LF Form with a number of "required" fields in a given work process - when a request is made to execute this work process we would launch the Form - first checking a given database to see if there is information available for any of the Form fields and if there is then populated that info to the Form - display the Form and let the individual who launched the request fill in the rest of the missing required fields on the Form - then submit this Form which then updates the database with the rest of the fields that were manually entered
From my understanding of what you just said, yes that should be possible. You should be able to perform a database lookup to populate any fields on the form. The user can then input their own information and update information that was pulled from the database. Once the form is submitted, the forms process would kick off a Workflow that would write the information back to the database.