Please click here for full reference on Lookup DSC.
Using the Avoka Lookup DSC
Scenario
We want workflow to give the opportunity for an applicant to email the approver; however a User-task can only record the approver's User-ID. User-ID is an internal LiveCycle string that is meaningful only to LiveCycle. How do we find out his email address?
An approval task is often issued dynamically based on business rules. So we cannot hard code the email address of the approver - we need to look it up. Any User-task supports storing the user-ID of the person who performed the step, however it does not support extracting any personal information about him/her.
We could write an LDAP query to do this, but this can be tricky. A Much easier technique is to use the Lookup-User task on the Avoka Lookup DSC.
The Lookup DSC
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The Lookup-User task is one of the types of lookup available on the Lookup DSC, by Avoka Technologies. It is designed to allow processes to easily find out more about a particular user by given a search ID. The Lookup DSC can also lookup information about a particular group, however for this scenario we only need lookup user.
We will use Lookup-User to find the email address of a user given a User-ID. We could also retrieve the user's Family Name, Telephone Number, and Organization, provided these are stored in the ES Environment. |
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To obtain an evaluation copy of the Lookup DSC, go to the Avoka Website: http://www.avoka.com and follow the links.
The Lookup DSC, once installed, will appear as a new service in your LiveCycle WorkBench. |
The Process
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As shown in this Figure, the task "Lookup Approver's Email" can be used to learn the email address of the user who performed the task "Approval". |
Saving the user-id in the User step
You must ensure that you save the user-id of the user who completed the User step.
You'll need to:
- Create a new String variable (called "approverID" in our example)
- Save the user-id into that variable, as shown below:
Setting Properties on the Lookup DSC
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To configure the properties we first click on the DSC and view the properties tab (Left).
Click on "..." inside Inputs. This will create the Lookup User Settings Dialog (shown below). The type of query we need to choose is "User Principal ID". Then we need to point the "User Principal ID" field to a variable that stores it. This variable should have been primed if the User-Task was set correctly.
Finally we point the output field "Email Address" to a process variable for later use (shown left). |
