Re: Howto use Enterprise Forms as content publisher

This article describes the use of the Form Template as an article which goes through an approval process before being published and available for public viewing.

In regards to your point 1:

If a user has Form Creator access in the Form Template Manager module, that user needs to Lock the form template before the user can have exclusive access to editing the form. Thus if a form template (article) is not locked for editing, you will not be able to modify the form template content.

In regards to your point 2:

Because we are only using the Form Template Manager module to design and publish article and not collect content from users we can not use the Report Manager module to display article links. The Report Manager is only used to display collected information from a publish form template. Thus there is a distinction between using Enterprise Forms as a normal web form designer or using it as a content publisher

Re: Howto use Enterprise Forms as content publisher

Appologize for the delayed response.


What we are trying to illustrate in the article is that Enterprise Forms could be used to create content. Content could then go through an approval quality assurance (QA) process. Once the QA is completed it can then be published for public viewing. The Form Template Manager module manages the content creation, approval and publishing. The Data Collection Manager module looks after displaying the published form.


Let us try to map Enterprise Forms Template roles to your company roles

EF Form Creators --> Company Role 1
EF Form Creators/Approvers/Publishers --> Company Role 2
Normal Users --> Company Role 3

In regard to your questions from earlier post:

1. An article here is the Form Template. Thus anyone in Company Role 1 can create the article then later edit the article. However once the articled has been edited, it can not be published again without being approved by users in Company Role 2

2. In Enterprise Forms Template manager module, a form creator can only edit a form template (article) when the Form Template in DEVELOPMENT status. In addition the form creator must have exclusive lock to the form template for editing. If a user does not satisfy the above condition a "read-only" message will appear, and the user can only view content but not edit

3. The Form Template manager should only be granted to users who deal with creating and publishing content. Once the content has been publish, you then use the Data Collection Manager to then display the content in its right format without the grid layout, text boxes, etc. The security of the Data Collection Manager is control via the module's security settings in a normal way. Having said that, it is possible to grant users to only have READ access to the Form Template Manager module.

4. The Report Manager can not be use in this instances because, we are not collection data at all. A new module needs to be created if should be to have some sort of menu system with links to published content.

Hope that helps

Re: Howto use Enterprise Forms as content publisher

That is correct. Our idea of content publishing is using each form template as a separate article. This way it allow more freedom in design layout for the article author.

However, your way of thinking would also work and is infact might be more suited if the articles need to follow the same layout.

The advantage of using a single form template and form intances as articles is that you can use the Report Manager to generate summary view of articles in which you can also have link to full details of the article. In addition, if your form template fields contain mostly Rich Text Editors, then when the form is displayed in Read-only more these fields are displayed as proper labels instead of text boxes as in versions prior to 2.2.

As for data storage, form data are stored in Enterprise Forms tables and not in an XML document. However, you would need to have a knowledge of the XML schema before data cam properly be extracted. One of the ways that you can view captured form data or articles in a table like format is via the Report Manager. When a report template is created, the system generates a database view, which gives you a flat view of all the fields in a table like structure. The advantage of this is that you can use this view in any other SQL

Re: Howto use Enterprise Forms as content publisher

With dabinding and postback are now in place I don't see any reason why you could not have a dropdownlist of content to display via the data collection manager module.