Taskspace: start workflow on object

A couple of questions related to starting a workflow on an object. I've configured an action to invoke a workflow on "the current folder", and have added a button to the folder view for that type (derived from dm_folder) to display a button to invoke the action.

Q1. In the options available when creating the configurable action, there is the option of sending the objects as attachments - either true or false. If set to true, I find the object attached as said. Just a minor question: if set to false, does this meant the object is sent in a different way? Or does it simply mean that the object is not sent at all? If it's the latter, I wonder why this choice is even there since wouldn't this simply be a "start workflow" action (i.e. without an object)? Just wondering if I've missed something.

Q2. When configured to send the folder object as an attachment, I do see that the object has been sent. I did this by creating a form in Forms Builder that is of the "initiate process" template, and configured the form to be associated with the initiate activity of the process I am invoking (see above). But here's the question: I can only deal with the attachment as a sort of black box - it can be displayed using the usual "Select ... [Remove]" control, and I can even choose which attribute to display.... however I would like to simply pull out one of the attributes and display it in a read-only text field. Is there a way to do this? Or a different way to get the desired effect?

The desired effect: using a button configured to start a process on a currently open folder, display a form that shows some attributes associated with that folder. I described one route I've explored above. Any other route is fine.

Thanks in advance.

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sahataba

The ugly way could be to just add text field controls, and bind it to some package(folder) attributes.

aabdallah

Thanks for the idea. I already tried it for a long time. The binding needs to be to the "Attachment" in the Data Model under "Attachments". However when I try to bind this to a text field, the option simply isn't there. In other words, in the Properties pane for the text field, under "Special" there is a dropdown list marked "Binding"... and the "Attachments/Attachment" is NOT listed.

On the other hand if I add an Attachment UI control to the form, then I can bind it to the data model. (see the attached pic).

Thanks again, but it looks like it's a bit trickier.

sahataba

But why do you add folder as an atachment, why don't you add folder as a package.

aabdallah

You were absolutely right: now I understand the difference between the choice of routing the objects as attachments or "not" - "not" means route them through the packages. Based on what I remember from reading the Technical Fundamentals manual, the packages are matched up based on type. So I created a package to accept the type I want to send... and it did arrive! (this after setting "route objects as attachments" to false).

Yet, one problem remains - it seems like I am very close, but still not quite there - how to let Forms Builder give me the option of binding to different attributes of that package? I only see a few things it allows binding to:

PackageName
PackageType
PackageId
DocumentId
DocumentName
Mandatory
Attachment
note / *

But what I'd like to bind to is a custom attribute of the folder I am sending in. I don't see how to bind to any attribute other than what is listed. The DocumentId turns out to be the r_object_id of the folder, so I thought I could write an adaptor to read in the desired attributes using a data source adaptor (Docbase, SBO) at form initialization, but all this led to was a NullPointerException.

Very close. Judging from more than one other thread, if this can work, it will solve problems for a few other people.

sahataba

You can embed Custom electronic form in task template form and bind it to a DocumentId of a package. And then you can customize electronic form to show custom attributes of a folder.

aabdallah

This sounds great, and I stumbled upon it a couple of days ago in the documentation for the Grants Application tutorial. But - and I hate to keep asking you questions but you are being very patient - there's one problem: you mentioned task template form. If you see above at the beginning of the thread, I mentioned that I'm dealing with an initate process template form. As far as I can tell, I can't associate a task template form with an "Initiate" activity.

However, if you have a trick up your sleeve to immediately pull a user to the task right after the initiate activity, that would solve the problem I think. In other words, if a person invokes a workflow on an object, can we have the workflow immediately go into the task view associated with the task AFTER the initiate activity? All the examples I've seen force the user to go back to the inbox... and the workflow example that is in front of me doesn't need that: it is a single person who is doing all the tasks.

Again, you're very kind, I'm learning a lot from your answers.

sahataba

For the second part, yes i think that it can't be done. that is not in the spirit of documentum. If a user must do multiple things then it should probably all be done in the same activity.

I also checked the initiate template, and yes electronic form can't be embeded. ****

but you can have two more options, not so elegant but should work.

1. using adaptors, to initialize controls(using adaptors you have full control of what you do.)

2. using process variables, and map package properties to variables and backward

i'm also new to taskspace(one weak), and i haven't done any of this. but it should definitely work.

i'm patient because i got this week to explore taskspace capabilities.

aabdallah

Yes, it's definitely tricky... well, if you get anywhere with this, share it please because I think more than one person would benefit.

Here's my opinion on the two options you suggest (and it's good to have options!):

1. I tried setting a Data Source (docbase/SBO) adaptor to use the DocumentId from the passed in package in a small DQL query to read in extra data... but it gives a NullPointerException.

Even worse, as you have seen in the "Initiate Process" template, there isn't even any way to add additional elements to the data model: it is frozen at the process data, packages, and attachments basically. So if one wanted a dynamic form that used 'derived' information from the passed in object to the workflow, it is not clear how to do this yet.

2. Using process variables is nice ... once the process gets going. But in this scenario - and it's not an uncommon one in my honest opinion - the user is simply starting a process on an existing object, and the process variables are still uninitialized. If there were a way to "stumble" out of the "Initiate Process" quickly to get the process going to another task - WITHOUT going to the Inbox - then we could use all sorts of nice functionality lice process variables and data process mappings.

But here it's a problem of "getting the car started"...

Well, that's my input, let's see what happens. After many hours of working on this, I don't think it's possible to get data cleanly passed into a process and appearing in an initial form quite frankly. Hopefully Documentum 7.0 will address this.