Liquid Office to Autonomy Process Automation (APA)
Liquid Office has changed its name to Autonomy Process Automation (APA). The version number is at 7.1 and 7.2 is due out soon. It has a new feature than makes hooking a workflow process to an existing HTML form very easy to do.
Assume you had a form created with the following HTML.
This form has no links or hooks into APA. It was created outside of the form designer. Using the new eclipse plugin, I can create a *.dfd file and hook the form into APA. Here are some of the screen shots of the tool and the file it creates.
JavaScript that hooks into existing form methods is stored as CDATA inside the dfd file.
Metadata can be defined and used later in the process scripting.
The eclipse plugin will communicate back to the main APA server and make sure the server side fields match the new HTML form fields.
Fields are mapped from the HTML to the APA fields defined on the server.
The following is the dfd file that is produced.
Using this new feature of APA, existing forms can now have workflow added to them. Branding an online form is no longer a task of wresting with the HTML produced by the form designer. This is a step in the right direction for any organization wanting to embrace eForms.
Scott Hamilton
ImageSource Inc.
