Interacting with content is a key capability of any workflow system. Many human centric tasks that are part of a more complex process involve the review or contribution of many kinds of content including documents and videos.
When user interact with tasks, we want their experience to be as informative, intuitive and error free as possible. The BAW Content Management toolkit provides a collection of user interface (UI) components that do just that when the tasks include some kind of content.
In BAW 25.0.0, we have updated a popular content UI view in the Content Management toolkit. The Document Explorer is commonly used on process task pages to collect or show documents that are being carried around by the process. It is also used in case solutions to show the case folder that is associated with each case instance that is created.
Since BAW is a tool that allows you to model and run your organization’s workflows, the ability to easily configure and customize these out-of-the-box UI components is essential so that your end users are provided the best experience possible and allowing them to be productive and accurate.
The first thing we added to the Document Explorer (as well as the Document List and File Uploader) is the ability to drag and drop documents from a user’s file system. For the Document Explorer, this also added the ability to add multiple documents and classify them all in one step.
Speaking of document classification, it is a powerful and important capability that allows you to have a better understanding of what a document is by more than just its name or file type. When a user adds a document to the Document Explorer, they are presented with a dialog box that shows them the document classes defined for your content management system.
The updated Document Explorer can now be configured to offer only the document classes that are appropriate for the specific process or case, reducing the chance that the documents are classified incorrectly (or not at all). You can leave the class’s display label blank to have the standard value used, but you can also override it to make it even easier to understand its purpose.
The Document Explorer included by default on any case details page is preconfigured with an action to display documents using the powerful viewer technology included with BAW. This viewer is capable of displaying a wide range of document types directly in the user’s web browser, sparing them from repeated downloads and missing desktop software. The features don’t stop there though; the viewer is also capable (controllable by configuration) of providing users with direct markup, watermarking and dynamic data redaction provided by the FileNet Content Management platform.
In addition to this view action, other standard actions are available to the users via a context menu on each document and folder in the list. These actions include things like download, edit properties, delete and the usual content management ones like check-out and check-in. With the updated Document Explorer, we also added the ability to configure these actions to suit your use case. For example, you can rename, reorder or completely remove any action you want.
You can also create your own custom actions that can execute code you place in the On custom action click event handler to do whatever you require.
// Add menu options to the "Custom actions" configuration option table and add the necessary logic here to execute the custom action.
// data.menuId would be the id parameter that you have set on the Custom Actions table
// *required* to handle default actions when added to custom actions table.
// Default folder action ids - Open, Rename Folder Reference, Remove from folder, Delete Folder
// Default document action ids - View, Download, Properties, Check Out, Check Out and Download, Cancel Check Out, Check In Document, Remove from folder, Delete Document
me.handleStandardActions(data);
if (data.menuId == "myCoolAction")
alert("Hello!");
We hope you like these enhancements and the many others that are part of BAW 25.0.0.