Question

Forms Inbox Email Reminder

Forms

Updated November 9, 2015

asked on May 7, 2015

Is there a way to send an e-mail nightly/daily if a user has actions they need to take in their Forms Inbox? I know I can set an e-mail to be sent when a form is routed to an individual for approval, but that's per-form and that could potentially generate quite a bit of e-mail depending on the person.

If this isn't directly doable with Forms, is there another way that I could replicate this functionality?

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Answer

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on November 9, 2015 • Show version history

I recently had to "resend" a notification which Forms sent out and had to build the URL out of the Forms DB.

You can read the Forms SQL database and see the list of pending approvals and formulate a link from there. It's kind of crude but the only way I know how to do it w/o using the solution Blake suggested.

The DB table [cf_bp_instance_approvers] contains all pending actions in the format

[cf_bp_instance_approvers]

[approver_id] = Not 100% on this one but I believe it's an auto incremented # for tracking which approval was captured and saved into the archive.

[resume_id] = The session id, needed for the link

[user_snapshot_id] = The forms application associates an ID to a user. Mapped by the [cf_user_snapshot] table.

So, if you wanted to send out a mass mailer you could run a sql query:

 SELECT 'http://lf/forms/form/approval/'  + [resume_id] AS URL, [email]
 FROM [LFFORMS_SERVER].[dbo].[cf_bp_instance_approvers] 
 LEFT JOIN LFFORMS_SERVER.dbo.[cf_user_snapshot]
 ON [LFFORMS_SERVER].[dbo].[cf_bp_instance_approvers].[user_snapshot_id] = [LFFORMS_SERVER].[dbo].[cf_user_snapshot].[id]

Assuming your forms URL is http://lf/forms and your database name is [LFFORMS_SERVER] this will spit out the URL to take the user right into their task and their email address.

Task URL	                                                                                                                email
http://rochsvr139/forms/form/approval/51a5522d-bc0b-4fb6-b63b-bee7a6217e2f	CHunter@mailserver.com

You could group this by email address to send out one email w/ multiple tasks.

The downside is you lose the specific information you may have configured in your notification in the business modeler. You could continue to dig through the Forms SQL DB to find the specific stuff but it gets hairy pretty quickly. Also, with Forms 10 coming up, and this reading right out of the DB, there's no guarantee this will work with that version.

But as far as I know, this is the closest I can get to sending out one email to a Forms users notifying them of all their pending tasks if they don't want to log into the Forms application and check their inbox.

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Replies

replied on May 7, 2015

Maybe a LF employee can point you to the DB Table that will contain that information and allow you to use workflow for this. That would be the only recommendable method to performing such a task currently as any other way I can think of is rather round-about and would be quite messy.

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replied on May 7, 2015

You can accomplish this by adding a timer event to a user task in Forms and then pointing it back to the user task. When you set the timer event you can specify the amount of time that should pass before interrupting the current process and reassigning it back to the user, which in turn resends the email.

To add the timer event, right click on the user task and select "Attach timer event".

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replied on May 7, 2015

Wouldn't that send an e-mail for every item that is currently pending? I'm just wanting one nightly/daily e-mail saying "You've got stuff pending in your Inbox"

I have users that won't be getting items on a consistent basis, maybe every two weeks they'll get a bunch of stuff at once, so they probably aren't going to be checking their Forms Inbox daily or regularly.

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replied on May 7, 2015

You are correct, it would send an email per item pending. I have discussed a summary email with the Forms team, so I know they are aware of the feature request. I just don't know if it will be included in Forms 10 or not.

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replied on May 11, 2015

My VAR set me up with a User In-Box Workflow(s) that will email our staff (only once a day) if they get any new documents in their User In-Box.

1) One Workflow is used to change a specific field on the folders of the In-Boxes if a new document is dropped, moved or created in one of these In-Boxes.

2) The second Workflow runs on a timer once a day. It checks for any of the specific fields on the folders to see if they have been changed to reflect any new items. If it finds any, it sends out an email for each of the owners of those User In-Boxes.

Connie Prendergast

Flagstaff County

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replied on May 11, 2015

Connie, I believe Josh is referring to a Forms inbox.

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