Workspace Save As Draft feature

[Elaine_Schmitz]

Workspace allows you to save a form as a draft. What happens to draft

documents that are accummulated, but never acted upon, due to

circumstances like the user is no longer using workspace, or has left

the company, etc? I mean, I know that once the form is submitted and the workflow is activated, you can set expirations and escalations. But what if the person initiates a form, and saves it as draft, thereby NEVER submitting it to the workflow process?



Considering what I've been learning, I think that I must create a custom render service that first sets expiration dates and then render the form and then workspace-enables the form?



Please advise,

Regards,

Elaine

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

These "saved as draft" tasks will stay in the system.



You could clear them up using the adminui, under Process Management.



Jasmin

[Elaine_Schmitz]

Thanks Jasmin. Can you provide further directions under "Process Management"? I just initiated three mortgage forms under user Tony Blue. Saved them as draft. Never submitted them. Received the message in workspace: "You have saved task 611 in Drafts in the To Do view".



In the admin ui, I can't find any of these tasks.



Thanks for your help,

E

[Jasmin_Charbonn]

So you click on your process under Process Management and you don't see it in there?



If you go under Task Search, do you see it in there?



Jasmin

[Elaine_Schmitz]

Correct. It's not there. I believe that's because the form was never submitted to any workflow. I just opened it up, and saved it, thereby sending the form to Tony Blue's Drafts folder.

[Elaine_Schmitz]

Here's the resolution I received from another adobe tech support contact: You would probably have to change the user's password so that the administrator can access his account through workspace and then delete all of his drafts. Since the form is not submitted, it has not entered the workflow process and will not show up as a task in the admin ui.



A request has been submitted to Adobe to add the ability for an administrator to remove drafts (in an upcoming release).



Not the answer I was hoping for, but that's ok...

[Jeff_Yates]

Here I go reviving a dead thread (yay zombies!) but I've run into this same topic recently, and wanted to share what I learned.

Saving a form as Draft within Workspace results in a write to the database.  That's mostly obvious, it has to be persisted somewhere.  The problem is exactly WHERE in the database, and WHAT can you do about "old" drafts.

WHERE is the Task table, tb_tasks, and the Form Data table, tb_form_data.  You can find all of the draft forms in your system with a query like this:

SELECT TT.instructions, TT.task_description, TT.step_name, TT.service_title, TF.initformvariable, TP.canonicalname, TP.commonname, TT.start_time, TT.process_instance_id
FROM tb_task TT, tb_form_data TF, edcprincipalentity TP, tb_assignment TA, tb_queue TQ
where TT.id = TF.task_id AND TT.status in (2, 4) and TT.current_assignment_id = TA.id and TQ.workflow_principal_id = TP.id AND TQ.id = TA.queue_id

Note that digging around like this is not recommended at all!  At least this is just a query, not a DB change, but there's no guarantees that indices are properly used and running this query won't consume your resources!

The draft form is in the TF.initformvariable.  The rest are there to be informative to the reader.  The TF.initformvariable column equates to a LiveCycle Document data type.  You can't really hand edit it or anything.

WHAT you can really do with this is, unfortunately, not much directly.  The good news is that as a Task item, old drafts should I believe get cleaned up using the Adobe Purge Utility, or the Avoka Purge Utility for a bit of a plug.

Jeff Yates

www.avoka.com