© 2011 AgilePoint, Inc. All rights reserved.
| FAQs / Envision |
Describe how due dates for manual tasks can be bound to a document metadata field or an InfoPath form's XML schema.
Due dates for manual tasks can be bound to a document metadata field or an InfoPath form's XML schema. The data binding is done using the standard process attribute syntax. View the attached InfoPath form and Process Template to see how this works.
The attached example includes a very simple InfoPath form that has a date-picker control. The form is associated with a simple process model that contains 1 manual activity. When the form is first submitted to the SharePoint Form Library, the manual activity will be assigned to the person who submitted the form. The due date of the assigned task will be determined by the value specified by the submitter in the date-picker field, because the Time Span Length property of the activity is bound to that element of the InfoPath form's XML. This data binding is done using the standard process attribute syntax. You can compare the syntax of that property value to the syntax used in the one email notification template also defined in the process model. The reason this works is that the Time Span Length property of the activity is data-type sensitive. If you specify a numeric value, it is interpreted as a duration. However, if you specify a "date" value, then it is interpreted as a specific due date. If you publish the form and process and submit a few copies of the form to SharePoint (using different date values in the form), you can see how the activity's due date and status will be based on the specified date value. E.g. If the specified date is in the past then the activity will immediately be Overdue. The exact same principal can be used for a document library-based workflow. Once you enable metadata binding (by configuring the AgilePointSettings.xml file on your SharePoint server) so that you can refer to the library's metadata columns using the process attribute, then you can use the value of a date-type metadata column as the value of the Time Span Length property of an activity, just as the attached example does with the InfoPath element.
© 2011 AgilePoint, Inc. All rights reserved.