Referencing Questions in BPM - Request Questions

[Martyn Houghton]

I believe the issue with referencing question responses in BPM has come up before, but wondered if there has been any further thought on how these can be handled/accessed better.

At the moment you can use the Get Request Information - Request Questions node to access them, but they are purely referenced by the order they where asked in the associated progressive capture. If you progressive capture has a branch in it which asks additional questions, then depending on the path taken through the PC, the question number you are looking for to use in a branch in your BPM could be different. Similarly if you use different PC with the same BPM workflow you have to ensure you ask the same questions in the same order.

Cheers

Martyn

[TrevorKillick]

Hi Martyn

It does come up quite often and i am sure the Service Management Development team have something in the pipeline to better address this, i will ask someone from the team to post an update on this.

Kind Regards

Trevor Killick

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Martyn

Thanks for the post and use case, we are doing a few things in this area and I hope this information helps:

1. It is possible as you say to take answers from progressive Capture custom forms and using the Get Information nodes in Business Process use the answers to branch, but as you say if you have medium to large progressive capture flows, and branching this can involve some planning in the business processes in order to capture and manage each possible route which could be taken and the different custom form answers.

2. We have introduced more Get Information options, to allow you to not only evaluate Progressive Capture Questions, Request Details but also now Information from either the Customer details, or Organisation details for the request.

3. You will shortly see an option to insert request variables via a menu control. This will allow you to include request variables in tasks and authorisations but also copy the answer from progressive Capture custom forms questions into the Summary and or Description Fields of a request - which can be evaluated and or included as variables in email templates.

4. We have a development story we are just starting which will allow for the mapping of progressive capture custom questions into request custom fields. This will perhaps provide the flexibility you are after, as this will still allow the flexibility of your branching in Progressive Capture and the use of custom forms, but it will allow you to populate the custom fields of the requests, with the answers from the questions in the different custom forms.

Then you can more simply evaluate just the specific custom fields needed in the business process engine, rather than factoring in all the possible custom forms which are used depending on the branching. An additional benefit of this mapping, will be the ability to include the mapped 'questions' into the custom fields of the request, so they will be available as variables to use in email templates.

I hope this helps and watch this space re the release of the mapping feature mentioned in point 4.

Thanks

Steve

[Martyn Houghton]

Steve

That would be a real help, especially the mapping feature,as this would give use the ability to reference the information consistently.

Cheers

Martyn

[Steven Boardman]

Hi Martyn 

Just an update to let you know the latest release of Service Manager now includes the ability to map the answers from Progressive Capture Questions into the Summary, Description or any of the custom fields on a request. 

More information here on the wiki:

https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Progressive_Capture_Workflow#Mapping_Fields_from_Customised_Forms

Hope this helps

Steve