How to auto-close and submit a form (without an User action)

Question

Hello, 
 I would like to know how may I trigger a submit action to a form, without a manual User action please ? 
 (it could be in using a timer... for example, submitting the form after 10 seconds) 
 
 I saw some related posts around Javascript, but is it possible to do this with Appian ? 
 Regards

cedric01 · Accepted Answer

Thank you Mike, I am testing a scenario... where a process contains a lot of nodes (let's say 50 nodes for a full saving process). I would like to break the process in 2 sub process, with a form displaying a message ("saving in progress..."). 
 But I would like this to be completely automatic.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

You can basically do that - but it will require user interaction to submit the form as always. I usually just make a button with a "refresh" icon, and if they click it when the background process is completed, it proceeds to the next chained task.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

I believe you can set it to use seconds, though it requires a workaround. Set it to use the expression "now() + intervalds(0, 0, 10)" which translates to "10 seconds from now". 
 But you should note that if this is a user-facing form where they would be submitting it or doing any other interaction, it will give the user an error after the expiration has fired. That's why I recommend you use the approach I suggested above.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

There may be a simple solution then, since there is no further User task in the sequence. 
 On the task in question, you can say "saving in progress... you can now navigate to a different tab" etc. Do not give a submit button or any other way for the user to submit. The user will leave the form by clicking to a different tab/etc. You can then safely auto-complete the task via timer after any interval (you can do 1 minute or any other length), without affecting the user's experience. 
 This is the way I've handled similar cases in the past and it works decently.

Mike Schmitt · Answer

These are all considerations, and all things that you should be able to design your process around, IMHO. 
 There are various techniques to accomplish this, the easiest and most obvious being, shift some of the user input "work" into a subsequent process task (i.e. not the start form) where the process will be able to run in the background and do some of the processing that doesn't rely on their input from that task, and then when they're done with that task, the background process can continue on in such a way that it utilizes what they've entered.