Enterprise Forms 4.1 introduces a new feature called External Database Connections (EDC), which essentially provides the ability to connect to external databases other than the default portal database.  Not only it is possible to connect to other Microsoft SQL databases, EDC also support other database servers such as Oracle, MySQL, VistaDB, PostgresSQL and of course Microsoft Access.

This article discusses the process of enabling and configuring External Database Connections in Enterprise Forms.  To setup External Database Connection you will need to

Activate External Database Connection feature for the portal Add database connections and associate with form templates Activate External Database Connection feature

To use EDC the feature needs to be enabled via a configuration settings which only a Host or SuperUser can have access to.  The EDC feature is a per portal setting which needs to be enabled or disabled for each portal Enterprise Forms is being...

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Paypal Workflow Task is an Advanced Workflow Processing task providing a mechanism to integrate form submission and Paypal payment processing.

To use the Paypal Workflow Task, simply select the PayPal Payment Gateway item from the list of available workflow processing tasks.  Note that the Paypal Payment Gateway must be enabled via Advanced Portal Features before it could be used.

Enterprise Forms has a mechanism called Conditional evaluation in which a number of powerful features derive from. 

• Conditional Databind: the ability to bind data to form fields based on a condition
• Conditional Visibility: the ability to hide/show as well as enable disable form fields based on a condition
• Conditional Workflow: the ability to move a form to different workflow states based on a certain condition
• Conditional Processing Task: the ability to execute advanced workflow processing task based on a certain condition.

The Form Template Manager module come with two designing modes, Standard and Lite mode.  The Standard mode provides a full set of features for creating a form template.  This of course include the form layout itself and associated workflow meta data (localization, states, access control and workflow).  The Lite mode on the other hand only provide the ability to edit the form layout.  However there are a number of advantages of the Lite mode over the Standard design mode.

Ready made new template - when creatine a new form template in Lite mode, the system automatically creates a simply form with pre-defined workflow meta data giving beginners access to quickly creating the required form and publish for usage.  The pre-defined workflow meta data is a simple 2 states workflow that allow registered users to submit a form from a New to a Submitted state. Quick approval - In Standard mode, publishing a form template requires that the form template go through a series of approval...

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Enterprise Forms has the ability to access data (read data via data binding and write data via SQL workflow processing task) from a datasource such as a database table or stored procedure.  By default the data source is located within the same database as where the DNN portal resides.  However it is posible to access data sources located outside the DNN database provided the database user (used to access DNN database) also have access to the other databases.  To access data sources from outside of DNN database, fully qualified name must be specified. 

[databasename].[owner].[objectname]

where

databasename: name of the database where the data object resides

owner: name of the owner of the data objects

objectname: name of the database object.  Object can be datatable/view or stored procedure

 

 

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