I have this sample application regarding Change Requests.
If the form is saved, it will send a form as an email to the listed approvers.
The form has 2 actions - Approve and Reject.
Let's say the approver approves the CR. It will update the emailed form document but the document that resides in my local database won't. Is there a way for me to update the documents in my local database automatically if the recipient(approver) has approved/rejected the document form?
Not automatically, but you can add logic to the approve and reject actions to update the database.
If this database is shared on a server, one way would be to make it a mail-in database. Your approval actions could then trigger an email that goes to that mail-in database address. Your database would then need an agent to process the emails, perhaps simply just parsing the subject line which could contain the UNID or some key that says which document to update along with the response of approved or rejected. This would work in a distributed environment.
If the environment is not distributed, say everyone is always on the same network connected to the same Notes server, then you could write some Lotusscript code to update the remote database directly.
Remember the context that you'll be in. When the emailed form is open in an approvers Notes client, he or she doesn't have access to your local databases. So you'll need to have a place on the server that the response action can update.
The safest design for a highly distributed workflow application, (replicas on multiple servers and local replicas on users laptops) is to have the approvals and updates posted as new responses and not have updates directly to the main WF document. The WF document should then compute the statues based on the responses. Finally, an agent running on ONE server can post the status updates to the document and archive the responses.
This construct will eliminate (or reduce significantly) the possibility of replication and save conflicts. It is particularly needed for WF items that require multiple approvals from people who are disconnected or connected to different servers.
Related
I have a Notes application that is used offline on a local replica most of the time.
Users can create and update documents.
On the server, an agent processes all new documents.
The idea is that - once the agent processed the documents - the users are no longer allowed to update the documents.
In general, this is quite simple to setup by setting author access on the documents processed by the agent.
But, because users work on the local replica and the agent runs on the server, this scenario is possible:
user creates document offline
replication of document (creating of doc on server)
agent runs on server / user updates document locally
replication of document (updating author access locally / updating changes on server) ==> Causes save conflict or inconsistent data
Is there a way to make sure that the user can no longer update a document once it is replicated to the server.
Or is there a way to force the agent to run on replication and immediately replicate the access update?
I was thinking of creating a button the user can click to replicate/update all documents, but to avoid users that forget to click the button, I prefer the default replication settings to make sure everything is replicated when possible.
When I investigated a few years ago replication does a "pull", then a "push", so doing something on the server won't work. There are a couple of options.
A separate "flag" document which server processing updates, instead of updating the actual document. This would allow for updates causing a second set of processing.
Store a config document / environment variable with the last replicated date, and check against that in the Form's queryModeChange and queryOpen (if editMode). You can then prevent editing if the document was created before the last replicated date.
Instead of using Author fields for the "wrong" reason, I'd add a non-editable Status field, with values like "Initial", "Ready", and all the rest you might need. Then, replication should be set up differently, using a formula that only replicates documents with Status!="Initial". The user might have 2 buttons to save a document: one just saves to the local database and the other also changes the status to Ready. Once Status="Ready", the user can no longer modify the document.
By the way, did you set document replication to "Merge conflicts"? You might reduce the number of conflicts considerably.
One alternative would be to set up the form so that the user never actually saves the document locally. Instead, the document is emailed to the server where an agent triggered by mail delivery performs the actual update. When the agent is done with the update, it sends an email back to the user telling him/her that the updates are available and instructing them to replicate in order to retrieve them. If the Notes client is actually being used for email, you can probably even put a button into the email and say "Click here to replicate and open your document".
I have this scenario (this is an old story of mail-in)
This is a company where have many Domino Mail-in databases. One for every branch.
Every person in every branch has a personal Notes Email.
The company policy is that each person of the branch can not send email to an external account (internal yes), so I need to use the mail-in database.
I tried with the rules of Domino to perform a block (in the rule you can set the Sender field to track the mail), but it does not seem possible because unfortunately, when a user sends an email from a mail-in database (mail9.ntf template) the sender field is the username.
I know about Team Mail box project, but this is an old project and I have some problems with HTML outgoing mail and it doesn't work on the web.
I tried looking for a solution, customizing the standard Mail9.ntf template and I discovered that the library "CoreEmailClasses" with the function QuerySave method is executed Me.m_noteUIMemo.Send()
I have tried to change this code copying the backend document into mail.box the mail...but this doesn't work because it is more complicated (there are TMP field...and I observed that when you use .send() into mail.box the RichText is a MIME-RT) .
The only solution that I have found is to save the email and later with a scheduled Sign Agents to Run on Behalf Of the mail-in user that sends the email (solution that I do not like because is not in realtime).
Do you have any other ideas?
UPDATE FOR INOTES
I've found into the FORMS9_x.nsf the subform
Custom_MailMemoDictionary_Lite that contains this code. Now I need to understand how to use it
<NotesComment>
//Use s_MDNToFrom to change the From field in outgoing email. If
//s_MDNToFrom is set, need to also provide From field. Uncomment out the
//dictionary to enable this
</NotesComment>
<NotesComment>
<NotesDictionary>
<notesvar name=s_MDNToFrom value={"1"}>
<notesvar NAME=From value={"Custom From Field"}>
</NotesDictionary>
</NotesComment>
I am not sure if this will solve your problem but we have found that setting the Mail-in name (item name FullName) in the Mail-in Database document to a hierarchical name allows us to setup the owner of the mail-in database as that user. Then mail sent from that database is from the mail-in name sent by the actual user.
For example: use a name like: Branch1 Email/Organization and set the internet email to branch1.email#oraganization.com and then set the owner of the target database to Branch1 Email/Organization
Good luck!
deletes the contents of the subform and paste the following code
<NotesDictionary>
<notesvar name=s_MDNToFrom value={"1"}>
<notesvar NAME=From value={Principal}>
</NotesDictionary>
kind regards
I m working with xpages for following scenario.
I have one agent that will update the value to one of the field of datasource from notesview. sometimes, while one user is opening the datasource via xpage and other user run the agent in the same time. at that time, agent can run and update the field of datasource. but from the xpages side, we can catch the exception for the document is modified by other user and cannot save the xpages.
i would like to prevent this from agent side. i would like to know whether there is a way to know that document is opened by one of the user from agent side, so that agent wont update the value to that datasource.
thank for your help.
First of all: mixing agent and XPages is more trouble than it is worth, you are better off converting your agent code into a Java class (and pay the technical debt accumulated over time in the agent).
One BIG reason: an agent and XPages do not share anything other than the document in memory (if handed over) on that one user's session.
If you launch the agent from an XPage: you can use an ApplicationScope variable (e.g. a java.util.HashMap) that you fill with the unid and username when a user opens a document. Before you launch that agent, you check the scope if the unid is inside with a different username. If yes, don't run the agent.
You need to build a mechanism to expire and renew these locks otherwise you end up with dead lock entries.
If the agent is launched directly or on schedule things get a little more complicated. You could implement a web service servlet that handles the locks since both XPages and agents can talk to a web service.
I have a web application that monitors farms in certain areas. Right now I am having a problem of performing automation with some of the tasks.
Users of the web application can send reports or checkins using keywords. If the reports or checkins correspond to certain keywords, for example "alert", I need the web application to send an alert to the user via email using that web application. But that alert must be sent two weeks after the date of the report received, and to that particular user only.
Would it be possible to use cron to perform this? If not, can anyone suggest me a workaround?
A possible approach you might consider is to store an entry in a database for each of these reminder emails you need to send, at the time your user does whatever action in your application that determines the need to send that email exists. Include the recipient, the date to be sent, and the email content as content you store for each entry. Schedule a single cron job to run periodically to process these database records by due date, and populate an email template to be sent out. You can then either delete the database records, or a better option, include a column that indicates they were sent and mark them as sent.
It would help to provide which technology stack you're operating on and what the application is developed in. Others might be able to point you to technology specific approaches or pre-built plugins/extensions that already do this for the situation you're in, to help you avoid the need to write your own code for the solution.
This is a common problem that I find when programming a Lotus Notes App.
Use case: An employer fills out a request form in a Request database. A notification gets mailed to the person that may give them OK or REJECT for that request. The authority person visits the Request database and gives OK or REJECT.
Good. But, where would you save the approval status OK or REJECT:
Should the authority person have write access to the original request
and set the status directly (and may alter other data in the form)
Should the aproval action create a response doc to the original (and i cannot show in a view the current status)
Typically you are better off setting an approval status directly on the request. That may not seem initially ideal, but remember Lotus Notes isn't like a relational database where things would be more normalized.
Let's consider the alternative, putting a status in the response document. Now how do you show all the requests with their statuses? You'd probably have to write some code just to do that when with the first option you could just create a view.
You can control the access to the document using reader and writer access fields. See how the built in template does it (the approval workflow template). Essentially as the document changes state (i.e. New, Submitted for Approval, Approved or Denied, etc), you can also change the reader and writer access fields at that point.
Once, I designed a database that mailed that request to the approver with the form stored in the document. As long as the user accessed the document using a Notes client, they could click on a button in the message to approve, which would send a message back to the database with the field data to mark the request as approved. An agent in that request database was set to run when new mail arrived, read those messages and change status on the original requests. That way, the approver never had to leave their inbox and didn't even need rights to edit the request.
You could do it with URLs if the users would be approving via browser client - have the link to an agent and pass in the parameters.
Or, to go back to your scenario, once the requester has submitted the request, don't display the fields that you don't want changed, display the values as computed text instead.
Anyway you look at it, best to have the approval recorded on the original document.
For above, Everything is our concern. In SQL or any other RDMS, we are in need of normalize that. Similarly here we have view categorization, show response document in hierarchy, and a lot of great hide when functionality based on role, ACL, unique person and whatever you need. We can easily manipulate the data render depends on the current user.
For your Q:-
1. We can control the appropriate user[authority person] from editing the request form's item.
2. We can also do by the response document. There we can show the documents in view by using show the Response documents in hierarchy.