WebFormZ “Actions”
Summary of Feature
One of the most powerful things about WebFormZ is its ability to carry out workflow within iMIS but
what does this mean? Well say you want to ensure that before a form is displayed it shows certain
prefilled data or when a form is saves then certain data is saved, these are “actions” and there are many
more that can used singly or in sequence to create some great effects and enhance your iMIS
productivity.
Where in WebFormZ can we use actions?
There are three places in the product that you will find actions based workflow being used:
Form Actions
A form action is processed only in two circumstances:
Before the form is shown to the user
After the form is saved on the creation of a new form or update
Typically you will want to process an form action to pre-populate data from regular iMIS fields into a
form before it is displayed to the user. Be mindful that if you use a form action to save or update fields
to iMIS data that this will happen every time there is a save or update and so this might hog your
processor and system resources in some circumstances.
Before
Display
of
form
After
Save/Submit
of
form
Question Actions
A question action works at an intra-form level only and is designed to be used to control the way the
user is able to progress through the form.
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Status Change Actions
A status change action is in some ways similar to the form action and in fact in some areas they do
similar things but status change actions are more powerful in that they are linked to the workflow of the
form process.
In Progress
Submitted
Accepted
Actions
Actions
Actions
Send an email
Create and activity
Send an email
Activate Review
Send an email
In this simple example there each time the form goes to a new status as it progresses through the
system then a sequence of actions is taken.
Form Actions
Let’s take a closer look at the form actions that are available in the system at the moment.
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Open a form and choose the “Rules Tab” and you will find two sub tabs, System Rules and Custom Rules.
Choose “Custom Rules”.
There are four actions defined in this version of WebFormZ.
Create Activity
Read Contact
Save Contact
Send email
Create Activity
This action allows you to create an iMIS activity record with any activity type you wish.
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Here you can see we have chosen WebFormZ as the activity type and set the Rule to work when the
form is saved the first time as a new form. There are two lists displayed. The list on the left shows all the
available field types in the iMIS Activities system.
The field type is displayed next to the field
and it is essential to ensure that the field
type from the form matches the list when
you map from form fields to iMIS fields.
On the right side you can see the list of
fields in the form. Those marked in pink in
this screen shot (not in the system) are
system fields and those marked in yellow
are the form fields.
The system fields are there so that if you want to create a record of the form submission you can give
the activity record the appropriate system stamps as well as copy data from the form if needed to the
activity record.
We believe that only minimum details will ever be needed as you can always IQA on submissions
anyway so this is really only a way to consolidate historical information for overall intelligence purposes.
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Read Contact
The read contact action is designed to prefill information from iMIS fields to form fields. You should
ensure that you check the On Add/New – Before Commit under “Triggering Events” and then select the
fields from iMIS that you wish to map to form fields.
All iMIS fields are available for you to map to form fields. The list on the left hand side contains regular
fields, user-defined fields and multi-instance fields.
Those fields that show “Contact” are regular iMIS fields
and these contain all the usual suspects. The fields type
is shown in the line to make it easy to map fields to form
fields.
Address fields contain the various iMIS addresses that are
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stored and how many you will see depends on how many addresses are in use for your specific system.
If you have work address or home address defined you will see these prefixes used as well.
For each iMIS user defined table you will see
the name of the table as the prefix and then
the field name and type.
Take a look at the Name_MI table in this
example. This is an iMIS multi-instance table
and fields that are multi-instance will have
type MI after the field type and can be mapped
to multi-instance panels on the question form.
Save Contact
The save contact action is the opposite of the read contact action and of course if you want to read and
write you need to define both but can use one without the other.
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The fields available under Save Contact are the same as under read contact. Please make sure that
under Triggering Events you complete the after commit section and normally you will want this to run
on new/add and on update.
Sometimes it is better to put the save action in “status change” so that it is only triggered once the form
is submitted (or any other status).
Send email
The send email action is available to send automatic emails with any one of the predefined templates.
In this example the system will send an email out after the form is submitted. You may also wish to
check out the “System Rules” tab which contains some other email options.
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Question Actions
You will find question actions under the questions tab.
A question action(s) can be defined for each question (optionally).
When you open a question (select) you will see another tab “Rules” to the right of the definition.
You can click on “Add new rule” to add some action/workflow to this question. This will allow you to
show/hide fields, sections or pages as needed to control the workflow to the user.
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In this example we have defined that if the user enters the name Bob then the questions Age and Sex
will display. This also works on sections and pages and if pages are shown/hidden then it will
dynamically add/subtract them from the form workflow as needed.
It is also possible to use this type of rule to enable/disable questions. To use this feature you need to
choose “on Success” Enable Questions as an option. Say you want to not hide but to disable data entry
but still show the fields on the screen. In this case, choose this option.
Here is a rule defined to show that the field “title” should be shown only when the first name is
“Russell”.
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Question Rule – Enable title if first name is Russell
In this example, the user first name is called fred and the rule says to enable the question if the first
name is Russell. So lets say the user now enters Russell…
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The Title field is now enabled for data entry.
Status Change Rules
A lot of the power of WebFormZ is in Status change rules as the status codes are at the core of the
Workflow of WebFormZ.
You can find the status change rules in the Status Changes tab. You can have any number of lines and
they are processed in the order you have them displayed in the list.
What Status Change Actions are available?
The actions available will change as
we build and develop the product.
For the current version the following
actions are live and available.
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Activate Form
Activate Review
Change Form Status
Create Activity Record
Create Activity
Read Contact
Register Subscription
Save Contact
Send Email
Activate form
This action is designed to make another form available as part of a workflow process. Sometimes you
may want to take preliminary information on one form and more detailed follow on information as part
of a secondary process. This action will let you activate a form based on a status change.
In this example, if the status changes from “in progress” to “submitted” then activate the Awards
Nomination form 2012 and send an email to the person via the email template chosen.
Activate Review
If you have a review stage in your workflow and have defined forms with the “Review Form” type you
can use this action to add a review process into the form workflow.
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In this example, we have said that when the form workflow goes from “Submitted” to “Staff Review”
use the “Activate Review” action and select the “Review for Application” review form. Optionally, you
can also choose an email template to use to advise the applicant that the form has been flagged for
review. (Setup the email template in Setup).
With the activate review action you are able to activate another form. So activate xxxx form when form
yyyy goes from In progress to submitted for example. This might be used for example, if you want to
accept payments only when your application got approved. Thus you would create a membership form,
then it goes for a review if it is approved by reviewer you could activate payment form.
Change form status
This action will for the most part be used specifically as part of the review process. You can create
different statuses for review levels, so, you could link statuses to the master form based on the status of
the review form. For example, when reviewer approves the form change the submission status to
“Review complete” or “Review next level”.
When it goes for another level you could change the status to “Review Progress Stage 2” or if “Rejected”
you can directly access the submission status of the original submission. For final reviewer you could set
the status to change “Approve” or “Reject”
Create Activity Records
See above under form action for full description
Read Contact
See above under form action for full description
Register Subscription
This action will allow the user to add an iMIS subscription into the workflow under a rule.
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For example if gold member charge 100 if silver charge 50 and if bronze charge 25. This feature is NOT
LIVE and will be updated in the next release.
Save Contact
See above under form action for full description
Send email
See above under form action for full description
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