Similar to the functionality of using a form formula in a view, I would like to figure a way to provide someone with a link to a document via a URL and have it open in an alternate form. I'm trying not to modify the actual form value on the document, that gets messy to keep straight.
The form is a very complicated form with tabbed tables and 90% admin data, but I would like to turn over the maintenance of just one small set of fields to the user community without them seeing everything else.
Is there a way to force a link to open it BY WAY OF A VIEW that has a form formula? That is what I am thinking. Either that or I create/populate some smallish document when providing the link, then send them a link to this smaller document and have it update the 'parent' in it's webquerysave event.
Thanks,
Matt
If you want to open the document in Notes, you could try to send them a notes-URL, in the form of
notes://yourServer/yourDatabase.nsf/yourView/yourKey?OpenDocument
I remember having a conversation about this with one of the original developers of the Domino web server many, many years ago -- but I wasn't 100% certain that I remembered the answer correctly. So, I just searched through my old documents looking for a draft of the article I was writing when I had that conversation (in 1997!). It turns out that I didn't cover it in that particular article, but I did cover it several years later in one of the chapters that I wrote for the Lotus Notes & Domino 6 Programming Bible
You may be wondering why, since a UNID uniquely identifies any note, is it necessary to include both a Document UNID and a View UNID in a URL. The same question actually applies to doclinks, which were discussed above. The truth is that you don’t have to include a View UNID in either case, but it does serve a purpose if you do. You can replace the View UNID in a URL with a zero, retaining the slash characters that surround it. If you do this, Domino will not be able to execute a Form formula, which you may have included in the code of one or more Views in your application. See chapter 15 for more information about Form formulas.
In other words, if you include the UNID of a view that has the Form Formula that you wnat in the ?OpenDocument URL that you are sending to the server. The Form Formula will be respected.
Related
The idea was to be able to, as soon as a receive a mail with a PDF attached, find a way in which the PDF can be downloaded and be searched for a specific keyword (for instance, see if my name is in it) and if my name is on any of the pages of the PDF, then send another mail notifying the user that there’s a pdf in which he has been named.
This is in order to avoid having to check dozens of mails daily and PDFs just to see if your name is in it or not.
I managed to do this using Zapier but I relied on PDFco’s API for the search, and it is payware, so I’m taking a different approach.
My question is more based on what library would make that search inside the PDF and would provide a Boolean value that said if the keyword exists or not.
Thank you!
I have a workflow which runs every time a new list item is added.
The list item comprises of 3 fields:
a question,
a person to answer the question,
an answer.
The first 2 fields are supplied by the user who creates the list item, and the workflow routes the item to the expert who supplies #3, the answer.
On the answer form, I would like the question field to be populated with the question, however I can't drag the question field onto the form without it creating a repeating section, when it should be creating a textbox? It says the type is a group rather than just a string?
I'd also like to know how to get workflow variables into InfoPath forms.
Any ideas on how I'd go about creating a simple q&a collection workflow would be most appreciated.
The tl;dr part is the workflow needs to do this :
ask a question and specify a named user
route to user via workflow
get an answer from user
and that's it.
Your first issue is caused by the fact that your question node is a repeating node in your xml schema (see Data, Show fields, then double click the node and see that the Repeating check box is ticked). I suspect you probably wanted a repeating group with Question and Answer nodes. You would then drag the group onto the form. However it might be easier to simply hard code your schema to a specific number of questions as it'll save a bit of jiggery pokery getting the question text loaded in as you'll see below.
The second part is a little more involved and there are few good explainations on the web on how to do it. I have 2 books and neither are great at explaining this! Firstly you need to create a secondary datasource in the form and link it to an ItemMetadata.xml file which contains
<z:row xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" ows_Question1="" />
<z:row xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" ows_Question2="" />
etc. - note no root node exaclty like shown.
Then in your workflow you can set the value that your form will get in this secondary datasource at runtime by using something like:
MyFirstTaskTaskProperties.ExtendedProperties["Question1"] = "The text
of question 1";
In your infopath form you should set the default value of Main datasource question field to the node in the secondary datasource. Then when the thing runs it will work.
I hope you are reasonably familiar with SharePoint workflows as there are quite few other things you need to do to get an infopath form working in a workflow. In my experience it's quite painful getting it all working. Good luck my friend.
So, I'm trying to come up with a better way to do a dynamic help module that displays a distinct help page for each page of a website. Currently there is a help.aspx that has a title and div section that is filled by methods that grab a database record. Each DB record is stored html withy the specific help content. Now, this works but it is an utter pain to maintain when, say an image, changes or the text has to be edited, you have to find and updated 1 or more DB records. I was thinking instead, I could build a single html page that basically shows/hides panels and inside each panel is the appropriate help content. As long as you follow a proper naming convention (name the panels ID to the page/content it represents) using ctrl + f will get you where you need to go and make it easier to find the content you need. What I'm curious of is would this have an impact on performance? The html page would be a fairly large file and would be hosted/ran at the server but it would also remove the need for Database calls. Would the work even be worth the benefit here or am I reinventing the wheel already in place?
Dynamic anything should be stored in the database. A truly usable web application should NEVER need code modified to change content. Hiding content is usually not a good idea, imagine if you expanded your application to 100 different pages that need their own help page. Then when someone clicks help their browser has to load 99 hidden pages to get 1 that it will show. You need to break your help page down into sections and just store the plain text in the database. I would need to know more about what language you're using as well as the architecture you're using to elaborate further but take a look below.
The need your describing is pretty much what MVC (web application architecture type) was built for.
If you're already using ASP.net and you aren't too far into your project I would consider switching to MVC. It's an architecture built specifically with dynamic page content in mind. You build different 'Views' (the V in MVC) that will dynamically build the HTML based on the content it receives from the Controller (The C in MVC) which pulls it's data from the database/Model (The M) and modifies it for the View. Also once you get into MVC you can couple it with Razor and half of your code get's written for you. It's a wonderful thing.
http://www.asp.net/mvc
Foreword: I want to allow users to define high quality document templates and then inject there data from our information system and print the result. I think MS Word is a great starting point, because this work is aimed to business letters etc., not data reports.
Question: Is it possible to add a custom field provider to MS Word?
I don't have English MS Word, so I must try to describe what I mean in a few sentences. Normally we can insert "fields" like author name, current date etc. These fields work seamlessly. We can switch view of fileds between data and definition. Definion of author field looks like this: { AUTHOR \\* MERGEFORMAT }.
Now I want to inject external data into documents and let user specify where to put them. A user should define a document template and mark spots where external data should be injected. Since Word users generally aren't IT experts, the easiest way for them is to use some macros or "insert field" option to do it. So I want to define my own set of fields and connect Word to my custom field and data provider. How to do it? I am unable to find any documentation on this.
I think this approach is better than using sql database connection or something like that, because I want to let the external source define list of known fields and their values, not the docx document itself. Also, data source won't actually be an sql database.
Yes you can do this by using Custom Document Properties as placeholders and then use some VBA code to set those properties to whatever you want. You can get the data via ODBC or from an Excel spreadsheet or from a text file.
First of all, experiment manually by going into File, Properties and creating some custom properties. Give them a value and then, in the document, insert some DocProperty fields. If you can't find DocProperty in your language version of Word then look through a list of the fields like Author etc. Since field names are visible to end users they might have been translated.
Then in order to complete your document template, create a VBA function that uses SetProperty. Read this article for more details. It is up to you whether the VBA is triggered by opening the file or whether you add a menu item to do that.
No need for special controls or any commercial add-ons. I'm going to add a VBA tag to your question since this is really a VBA programming question. In fact, this has been possible since Word for Windows 1.0.
Using SetProperty in VBA is a bit more complex now. I got the following snippet of code from this forum posting.
object docProps = wdDoc.CustomDocumentProperties;
Type docPropsType = docProps.GetType();
object Prop = docPropsType.InvokeMember("Item",
BindingFlags.Default |
BindingFlags.GetProperty,
null, docProps,
new object[] {propName} );
Type PropType = Prop.GetType();
PropType.InvokeMember("Item",
BindingFlags.Default |
BindingFlags.SetProperty,
null, docProps,
new object[] {propName,propValue} );
Absolutely, this is the exact kind of scenario that Content Controls and CustomXMLParts were built for (Word 2007/2010 only, not earlier .doc format).
Most of the Word Developer Center home page deals with these two: Content Controls and CustomXMLParts. If you go this route, you'll find the Word Content Control Toolkit an invaluable resource as well, especially when just starting out.
From an end-user perspective, it could be as simple as just creating buttons on the Ribbon for insertable Content Controls via a template or document add-in (VSTO or VBA).
If you want a fairly decent prebuilt solution, check out Windward reports.
Yeah, the name makes it sound like a reporting tool, but in reality, it's exactly what you're describing. They have a Word add in that allows users to easily mark up a word doc with fields to be inserted from your data source.
I built a very similar system for a law firm. Windward didn't do quite everything I needed it to do, but at the same time, it's pretty powerful.
I have a web form which the users fill and the info send to server and stored on a database. I am worried that Robots might just fill in the form and I will end up with a database full of useless records. How can I prevent Robots from filling in my forms? I am thinking maybe something like Stackoverflow's robot detection, where if it thinks you are a robot, it asks you to verify that you are not. Is there a server-side API in Perl, Java or PHP?
There are several solutions.
Use a CAPTCHA. SO uses reCAPTCHA as far as I know.
Add an extra field to your form and hide it with CSS (display:none). A normal user would not see this field and therefore will not fill it. You check at the submission if this field is empty. If not, then you are dealing with a robot that has carefully filled out all form fields. This technique is usually referred to as a "honeypot".
Add a JavaScript timer function. At the page load it starts a value at zero and then increases it as time passes. A normal user would read and fill out your form for some time and only then submit it. A robot would just fill out and submit the form immediately upon receiving it. You check if the value has gone much from zero at the submission. If it has, then it is likely a real user. If you see just a couple of seconds (or even no value at all due to the robots not executing JavaScript) then it is likely a robot. This will however only work if you decide you will require your users have JavaScript on in order to perform "write" operations.
There are other techniques for sure. But these are quite simple and effective.
You can use reCAPTCHA (same as stackoverflow) - they have libraries for a number of programming languages.
I've always preferred Honeypot captcha (article by phil haack), as its less invasive to the user.
Captchas bring accessibility problems and will be ultimately defeated by software recognition.
I recommand the reading of this short article about bot traps, which include hidden fields, as Matthew Vines and New in town already suggested.
Anyway, you are still free to use both captcha and bot traps.
CAPTCHA is great. The other thing you can do that will prevent 99% of your robot traffic yet not annoy your users is to validate fields.
My site, I check for text in fields like zip code and phone number. That has removed all of the non-targeted robot misinformation.
You could create a two-step system in which a user fills the form, but then must reply to an e-mail to "activate" the record within a set period of time - say 24 hours.
In the back end, instead of populating your current table with all the form submissions, you could put them into a temporary table that automatically deletes any row that is older than your time allotment. Unless you have a serious bot problem, then I would think that the table wouldn't get that big, especially if the first form is just a few fields.
A benifit of this approach is that you don't have to use captcha or some other technology like that that might create some accessibility problems.