Is live updating of template fields possible?

asked on April 29, 2015

I was playing around with External Tables, giving myself access to a table on the SQL Server that also hosts Laserfiche.

1) I created a template with two fields dynamically referencing fields within this table, and the values were being pulled over properly as drop-down fields in my template.

2) I selected one value from each of the drop-downs, and saved my changes.

3) In the database, I went ahead and updated one of the values to something different.

What I noticed, when I tried this, was that although the dynamic field had been updated, this wasn't reflected in the template fields associated with my document, although the new values were now available in the drop-down menus that were being pulled dynamically from this table.

Is there a way (whether using Dynamic Fields/External Tables or not) that if an external data source is updated, it would be reflected in the template field? We were hoping to pull a specific status from another program, and use the change in status to trigger a workflow (or Route Entry task), if at all possible.

As always, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Marty Gaffney - Network Technician

Town of Okotoks

1 0

replied on April 29, 2015

The items in the external table are used for populating the list, but once a field's value has been set, there's no longer any direct connection back to the external table. Perhaps Workflow could monitor the external table itself and trigger the action directly?

0 0

replied on April 29, 2015

I was actually wondering the same thing. Could Workflow monitor the external table and notice if something was changed? The question would be how would Workflow know a change has been made? One thought is what if you had a second column in your table that was called old_value. When you need to change a value, you would change the value in the current column. Then have a workflow that checked however often you wanted to against each row in the table to see if the two values were the same. If they were different, then search the repository for every document/folder that has that value and change it to the new value. At the end of the workflow, it could change the values in the 2 columns to the same value.

0 0

replied on April 29, 2015

SQL Server offers triggers that can do those sort of updates. Workflow doesn't have a way of monitoring activity in SQL.

0 0

replied on April 30, 2015

One idea I was playing around with was implying a status had changed based on an activity, as opposed to the actual status changing itself (i.e. if this activity had happened in Laserfiche, we can imply this status had changed...instead of having the user needing to explicitly change the status themselves).

0 0

Question

Question

Is live updating of template fields possible?

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.