Hi
We’re soon to move over to Nintex Forms and WF 2010. We currently have WF 2007 and InfoPath 2007. We currently have a system where users can submit ‘time out request’s’ (ie Holiday, sickness, working from another relocation etc) via an InfoPath form. This form has start date and end date selectors and uses a formula within InfoPath to calculate how many days (taking into bank holidays) that the user has requested and displays that number within the form. We’re looking to set up something similar using Forms and WF 2010. My understanding is that to do something similar in Forms would require the WF to calculate the ‘number of days’ using Excel Services etc?
One issue I can see with this is that the user potentially won’t know how many days they have selected until the workflow calculates it and provides some feedback (probably after the item has been approved). Obviously they’ll have a good idea of how many days they‘ve selected but what’s quite good with the system we have now is that you can play around with the start and finish dates and get confirmation of how many days you’ve selected before submission. I assume the calendar part in Forms does not highlight bank holidays (ie bank holidays for a given calendar are circled or greyed out etc). In practise the user will only ever be pleasantly surprised (ie they didn’t realise there was a bank holiday in the date range resulting in it being 9 days requested off instead of 10). However had they known this before submission they might have requested an additional day. It’s a small point but its potentially quite a noticeable change that might result in more amendments being submitted. Can you trigger a workflow from within Forms that will update the Form while the user still has it open? Ie so they could click a refresh button that will run the date calculation and update a ‘days requested’ field within the form prior to the user submitting. If the 2010 environment runs like our 2007 there’s quite often a delay before a WF starts so such an approach is potentially not very practical.
We haven’t actually got Forms yet so this all might become more apparent once I get a bit of experience using it but my initial understanding is that it’s much more just for user input and leaves all the heavy lifting to the WF.
Thanks