Hidden Fields on Forms Performance Impact

asked on December 24, 2014 • Show version history

I have an online form and it will be used in Workflow to Fill Out a PDF. We opted to "uncondense" some fields to control data entry. For example, the Address field on the PDF is 1 field and on the online form it's 5 fields: AddressLine1/2, City, State, ZIP. We've done similar things with Full Name. The PDF form has 29 "condensed" fields while the online form representation has 96 "uncondensed" fields.

QUESTIONS

Is it better to create a hidden field on the form that will deliver the 1 "condensed" field needed to fill out the PDF?
Is it better use a SQL query to deliver 1 "condensed" token in LF Workflow to fill out the PDF?
Is it better to use Worflow's Token editor to deliver 1 "condensed" token without making a call to a database?

We'd like to ensure the best user experience possible and are curious know what other people are doing.

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replied on December 24, 2014

I assume you're reading the form data in Workflow with a Retrieve Form Data activity? If that's the case, then the data comes back as XML. Having one field instead of 5 makes for a marginally smaller XML (because you have 1 set of tags instead of 5, but that wouldn't be anything you would notice as performance hit/improvement.

You're going to have to pass the instance ID from Workflow to Forms anyway, so you might as well let Workflow read the data from the form rather than reading directly from SQL. This also has the advantage of being forward and backwards compatible. The activity will be supported for future versions of Forms too, but the SQL schema may change in the future.

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Hidden Fields on Forms Performance Impact

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