Hi John, I had a similar scenario to work with in past. Let me share the solution with you and list. I am assuming that users will answer data in character field.
There should be 3 forms in total a) UI form. b) Questions form c) Transactional Form(copy of questions form+a character field to answer the question+1 field to hold GUID passed from UI form) Here's flow: 1. On UI form, have a table field that represents the transactional form and a display-only character field(for answers) and "Save" button next to that table. Have another hidden table field that represents "Questions" form(there should not be any qual on this unless you wanna load specific questions). 2. On load of UI or on focus of "Question/Answer" tab(whichever you prefer), perform the following: a) Change field -->Refresh "Questions" form. b) Call guide to walk thru questions form. As you are walking through each record(which in this case is "question"), push each record to transactional form along with GUID.You can generate a GUID on UI table and use that and push it to transactional form as well so that you qual on "transaction" table in UI would look like 'guid'=$guid$. c) Change field-->Refresh "transactional" form and "Set focus". System is now ready for users to enter the answers. 3. On selection of record on "transactional" form, load "answer" field from transactional form into the display-only character field(initially it will be NULL). Train users so that they can enter answers in this field and have workflow on "Save" button so that it pushes the answer back to transactional form. Next time the users loads up the record they will see the answer. They can edit the answer and use the same "Save" button to commit it. Advantages of this approach: 1. You do not need to add/modify any workflow whenever new questions are added. As a matter of fact, questions can be added at any time since it will be just data. 2. Re-usable "Save" button/generic workflow for saving all records. 3. Generic workflow to load the table, pushing records to transactional form. 4. You can re-use the same workflow on multiple forms if there is a need. In a nutshell, "Write once-use anywhere" kind of workflow and much less overhead to maintain. Disadvantages: 1. User will have to answer each question separately and hit "Save" button. Total # of active links: 4 1. To perform "call guide" action on "questions" table and actions for refreshing of questions/transactional table. 2. To perform "push fields" to the transactional table. 3. To load data from transactional form when a record is selected. 4. "save" button workflow to push the answers back to transactional form. Active Link Guides: 1 1. Walk thru "Questions" table once(should be on $OPERATION$=CREATE). There could be 100 questions and you can still use this approach. You do not need to create 100 Active Links. I have not seen any performance issues with this approach so far and users are quite happy with it. HTH. Thanks Chintan. ________________________________ From: Shiju John <johns...@gmail.com> To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Sent: Sunday, August 28, 2011 1:12 AM Subject: Any Method to check within a record for 'not null' options? Hi, I have a generic issue. The issue is as described below: I have a form which stores 20 questions. These questions are not mandatory, and the user might answer any "n" questions out of this 20. I need to do a customization such that i need only the questions answered to be pushed to a new form, which segregates each of these "n" questions to "n" records in the new form. The basic and easiest approach would be to create 20 activelinks which checks if each question is answered or not, and based on that do a push to the new form. But this would degrade the performance as there are chances that the number of questions might increase in future. And this approach would be a hard code( method of implementing 20 active links) , and not configurable. Could some one suggest me a better approach to do this? Please pour in your thoughts !!! :) Thanks, Shiju. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
