Questionnaire with Workflow support

[andreas_scheuch]

Hi,

We consider to use Alfresco as Document-, Knowledge- and Workflow Management System in our institution.

One upcoming requirement is to integrate online questionnaires, wich produce data to be analysed later. AFAIK Alfresco is not supporting this feature out of the box.

So I had followin first rough Idea: Create a little Web Applikation, which offers the questionnaire. After filling the form and commiting it to the database, the Questionnaire Web App creates a Document in Alfresco via the webservice interface, which then is handled with a workflow. It has only the function of an token with http-link to the information set handeled in the Web App. What kind of actions have to be done later in the workflow, is not clear up to know, but I am interested, whether a scenario like this would be possible.

A scond point would be to trigger an event when some kind of documents (which would have to be defined in Alfresco) and notify an other Application over the Web Service Interface?

thanks and best regards,
Andreas Scheucher

[jayjayecl]

I don't get why you want to create an external webapp.
What would be handled by this webapp that Alfresco could not support ?
Why then transmit those pieces of information to Alfresco ?

In fact, I don't understand what is the aim of the workflow …

[andreas_scheuch]

Hi,

As far as I know, Alfresco has no build in Support for questionnaires. The external Web app should provide a online questionnaire for the user.

Let's assume, there are 200 filled out questionnaires per day, but the analysis should be only once a week. So the web app creates a dokument with a link back to the web app, which presents a statistik about all the filled questionnairs for the last week. The reason to create this little dokument is to be able to use a workflow, to force several persons to take a look at the statistik and take certain actions. After all of the involved persons have seen and reacted on it, the workflow ist finished.

Maybe my understanding of the workflow ist wrong, as I have not used it up to now. As I understood, it allows me to add a document to a workflow based on the documents metadata automatically. After it's added, the workflow can notify the first involved user (sending an email) to open the document and take some actions. After the first user has finished his actions, he can set it to finished. The workflow now knows, what to do next and send's the second involved person an email. And so on, till all involved parties have done their job and the workflow can be closed.

My intention is to involve other systems into the workflow on an easy way. But I am open for other solutions as well.

greets

[jayjayecl]

All right I understand.
I think you have a good understanding of workflows.
However, you might prefer to build the questionnaire inside Alfresco. Indeed, as workflows UI are handled via forms, you can decide that the first task's form is your questionnaire.

Here is an example (I'll assume you know a little about jBPM / Alfresco workflows… if not, have a look here : http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/WorkflowAdministration)
Let's take a simple questionnaire "questionnaire_1":
1/ What is your name : [TextField]
2/ Are your older than 30 : [boolean]
3/ Please leave some comment here : [TextArea]

You can define a workflow "questionnaire_1_processDefinition.xml" . Its first task would hold 3 custom properties :

<types>
        <type name="Q1:firstTask">
            <parent>bpm:startTask</parent>
            <properties>
                <property name="Q1:nameAnswer">
                    <title>What is your name ? </title>
                    <type>d:text</type>
                </property>
                <property name="Q1:olderThanThirtyAnswer">
                    <title>Are you older than thirty ?</title>
                    <type>d:boolean</type>
                </property>
                <property name="Q1:commentAnswer">
                    <title>Please leave a comment below</title>
                    <type>d:text</type>
                </property>
            </properties>
        </type>
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About the fact you need a document (file) containing the answers :
After the first task of your workflow, you can call a programmatic action that will gather the values entered by the user answering the questionnaire, in order to fill a document. You'll have plenty of choices :
- writing an XML file
- writing a plain text / html file
- writing an ODT / Doc / PDF file
etc  …

Then, this document can be added to your workflow's next steps.

Don't hesitate to ask if I was not clear enough.

[pat9rv3sousa]

Can you help me with an example of this ? My question is how can I write the answers for an XML file for example. You have any example?