Email forms

Has anyone found a way to attach a form to an email? We interface with outside vendors who are not on Metastorm and currently have to print our Metastom form, scan it , and then attach to the email before sending. Sure would be great to skip the print/scan part and just email directly.

Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

BPM

Comments

Tony Wheeler

Is the requirement that the forms be prefilled with current process variables or do you just want the blank form so your vendor can fill them out?

An XML representation of the form is stored in eForm.eLayout, but you may find it difficult to translate that into the same style/layout that your web users see. All the important input fields should be there so you can certainly build an adapter to handle that translation.

The other option is to go directly to the eFormBlob table, un-package the byte array into the string representation of the eForm.aspx page that gets saved there and literally embed that into an email.

Jennifer Methlie

The form has pre-populated info that we provide for them and then they complete the rest manually. We scan the paper version they return as part of our receiving records but don't need the specifics in the rest of our process.

achopra

Would it be a possibility that you could open up the process to allow the outside vendors to participate directly? You could have your process create a temporary username/password for the vendor, and send them an email with a link to the Folder that they need to action, along with their credentials. They would then take the action to fill out the form, and submit it on to the next Stage in the map (at which point you can delete their user account automatically).

The only catch with this approach is that the web server hosting your BPM app would have to live in the DMZ so that the external vendors can access the URL.

Ethan Beisher

One way that is popular of dealing with this problem: Create an e-mail that contains your questions and have the user just reply to the e-mail. By recognizing the subject line, the incoming e-mail can be routed using programming logic to the same folder or to create a new folder.

You can build this yourself, or use off the shelf functionality like this partner has built.

Tony Wheeler

There are probably multiple ways to do this, but off the top of my head, you can probably have a hidden memo field on the form tied to a local variable. Then in client side javascript, on form load do something like this (untested):

setField('memo', document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML);

This (or something like this) can populate that memo field. Then you can use the native SendEmail functionality built into the product.

Tony Wheeler

Sorry my syntax was wrong. This works to scrape the html from the DOM:

setField('memScrapedHTML','',document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].innerHTML);