Practical Example of Action Sets and Add-Ins

 

Practical Example of Action Sets and Add-Ins

In this article and accompanying video I want to present you with a practical example of Action Sets and Add-Ins and how they can help you in your everyday DocMgt life.

We all make mistakes but DocMgt makes it easy to recover and get on with life. Action Sets and Add-Ins come to the rescue! Let’s look at what Action Sets and Add-Ins are and how they work.

 

Action Sets

Action Sets allow you to bundle several actions into one package. This includes changing record values, sending emails, doing lookups and more. Action Sets are like mini workflows that can be called from various areas of the system like Work Triggers, buttons and more. They can even be called from inside other Action Sets. They are the perfect way to share series of actions with several processes. Write your routine one time and call it from many places like a re-usable module.

 

Add-Ins

Add-Ins allow you to add buttons to certain areas of the system to perform actions. Add-Ins can call programs, bring up web pages and even perform one or more actions. You can use them to add just that “something extra” to the application that makes the users’ lives easier.  Add-Ins can also run – you guessed it – Action Sets.

 

Using Them Together

Now back to our original premise of fixing your mistakes. Let’s say you just uploaded 1000 records and forgot to add a variable that your workflow requires to work correctly. Your workflows are stranded or maybe even at the wrong step. You have a few options to fix this such as:

1. 1. You could delete the records, change your importer configuration and re-import them. However, if the records have a lot of documents that might take hours.
   2. You could search up all the records and add the data values into them manually. You can do that with the multi-edit function in the search. However, they are already routed so how do you undo that and route them again?
   3. You could just let them go and hope nobody notices. I won’t even go there…

BUT what if I told you that you can save your upload and restart the workflow fairly easily? I am going to answer this one for you – “Yes please!”

It is really a 4-step process using Action Sets and Add-Ins

1. 1. Create an Action Set to (a) set your data value, (b) cancel the current workflow and (c) re-route the record.
   2. Create an Add-In that calls your new Action Set and make sure it shows up in the Search screen.
   3. Search up the records to fix. Typically, you would use a combination of Record Type, Creation Date and some other value to find the right records.
   4. Run the Add-In on all the searched records.

 

Here is a video that walks you through the entire process

 

 

Update for Version 4

In DocMgt Version 4 you can now do all this inside an Add-In without the need for an Action Set. Just place all your actions directly into the Add-In and you are good to go! Of course, you can still use Action Sets if you like.

 

 

Summary

Hopefully you can see why this practical example of Action Sets and Add-Ins is VERY useful. Add-Ins and Action Sets can be used for many, many purposes for your end users but why not use them for yourself? Why not make your life easier by using them to fix problems? Unless you have never had a problem or made any mistakes…