Execute Process or Update DB from within Tempo Report

Hello all,

I have a business case where a single Department is in charge of handling Legal Cases for a Bank and acts as a liaison between the Bank's branches and its partner lawyer firms. In this business case, this Department is responsible of performing a few Tasks but the most important is forwarding the requests to a selected lawyer firm. As they receive these requests, the would like to have a list of pending requests, in the form of a report, and have the ability to forward a batch of requests to a selected lawyer firm instead of going through each pending request and performing that action from within each pending request.

Given all the new functionality that Appian provides, i was thinking of building a Tempo Report that provides that list of pending requests to the users and giving them the ability to select (using a grid field) a number of requests execute an expression (either some form of DB update or an asynchronous Process Initiation) by pressing a button, since Tempo Reports are basically SAIL interfaces.

I believe this provides an improved user experience as it minimizes the steps the user has to go through in order to perform some action. However, i have not seen such use of expressions in Tempo Reports and i would like to know if such use is not recommended, and if not, for what reason.

Thanks

  Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible

Parents Reply


  • I am looking to start a process and/or write to DB. There are no active User Tasks at that point in the workflow that i'm describing. Or, at least that's what i'm going for. To not have a list of active tasks for a group of users where i could possibly design that part of the workflow differently, as i described above with the use of Tempo Reports.

    I am aware of the smart services (as functions) that you have mentioned, and because of that I started thinking of that design approach, of updating DB or initiating processes from within a Tempo Report. I know that from a technical point of view it can be done, I was wandering if it's an approach that is not recommended by Appian, for whatever reason.
Children