The Most Important Step to Migrate Forms: Qdabra Webinar 2021-09-16

good good morning everyone and welcome to cadaver's webinar today uh this is patrick i'm the project manager here at cadabra and um also the founder and i am happy to say that today actually yesterday was our 18th anniversary we started i started the company in september of 2003 it seems like forever ago i'm i'm really thrilled to have you here today uh we're going to show you this critical technique for migrating your forms and uh we also have a customer who's gonna do a testimonial uh or actually talk about what the process was like for for her um and uh so just to get started um welcome to our webinar uh mel clemente is our senior performance designer and she is the one who is uh gets all the credit for today's demo preparation and uh mel um can you say a few words yes i'm happy to be your presenter again today and yeah i hope you go you don't get tired of my voice here but i'm excited to just keep teaching you what we have for you especially in this topic of migration which everybody is interested in right okay yeah yeah can you share your screen let's just look at the first few slides and um we'll uh so we're going to do this in a couple different parts today we're going to um just kind of tell you what we're going to talk about our main theme today is migration and um that that is moving forms from one place to another so this is critical when you're moving forms from sharepoint on-prem to online in 365. it is also really important when you're dealing with like sharepoint 2010's turbo 2013 on-prem so there's different ways of migration and even we even think migration's really important when you're just developing in in one place because you've got typically a test or development environment and can you go the next slide now i think you're sharing that great yeah so we've got these these kind of uh key techniques for you today we're going to talk about what the most important step in the migration process is which is is making your data connections dynamic unfortunately in infopath you know the data connections are hard coded you can do relative ud6 kind of data connections but they don't they don't migrate very well because the 86 files also live on a place they live on that on usually on the server where the form is deployed and so when you're migrating from infopath to cadaver forms or when you're migrating from point a to point b the data connections is really the most important thing that you need to worry about and we're going to show you how to quickly add those make your data connections dynamic so that you don't have to do that anymore so that's the key the key takeaway for today's webinar um mel can you go to the next slide so this once again this is important for these different scenarios uh the scenario where you're moving to the cloud the scenario where you're moving off of infopath the scenario where you've got a production process and you're developing a new a new form and you need to move things from dev to test to production without having to worry about changing the underlying template so i'm going to share my screen real quick and just kind of give people a quick reference to what we did in july so we actually um we actually had a webinar we did in july so hopefully you can see my screen here um let me know if you can see it no yes i can see youtube so youtube youtube channel uh you just go to youtube.com cadabra and on july 15th we gave a presentation we talked about migrating forms from infopath to the cloud using cadaver forms and here is the presentation let me just quickly walk you through it basically this presentation um had a kind of a planning guide here's what you need to do uh you need to figure out how many forms you're going to migrate where your content is how many different sites and then when you're start migrating you need to fix up your form so we're really kind of focusing in on that fix up forms that middle step today and and that second bullet fixing data connections that's really the key thing but there are also other things you may want to do when you migrate such as making your form look better and and so on so now let's actually go quickly through and talk about let's actually quickly do the demo first and then we'll switch and introduce suzanne and ask her how her process went so i'm going to switch back to you great so here we are in our on-premise site here i'm just going to open one of our sample forms this donation it's the donation dashboard it queries data from a list on the same site so that instantly loads and it again gets data from a list here in the um on-prem site right here i opened the debug pane at the bottom there and here we can see that it's host url is coming from our q sharepoint 2013 which is again our on-prem site but then um we'll look at this form version and it's um 0.90 there then if i switch over to our office 365 site the um online sharepoint online and open the same template with the same version here exactly the same template versions there and i open it let's see what happens so it also loads the data without you know without any changes needed actually changes are all there the data connections are already ready dynamic if i look into the debug here now we'll see that the use host url is pointing to our office 365 site and yeah so can you quickly show them what it's doing on loading what are the commands down below it's it's actually getting the url for the site right yes and then how many data connections is it loading is it how many does it just have one query is that is that it just one unless the other data the determinations okay so it's a pretty simple data it's a pretty simple form it only has one data connection in it right yeah okay great so that and it can you switch back to the other one that you showed and show the how the commands look on that too so same set of commands it's just that the results were different and therefore okay guys so it fixed it up to the right side and then and of course this assumes that list is on the new site so that's really critical that if you don't have the list there it's going to fail right right okay cool great well thanks for that quick demo mel we're going to come back to you and and see how to do it but first i'd like to welcome suzanne king she is one of our customers and she has recently um i guess you've recently performed a a kind of a migration you you went from infopath to kid performs on prem um suzanne i'm gonna uh i think you can knute yourself but do you wanna yeah i'm just wanted to say hello and ask you to maybe uh say a few words about how the process went um for sure for your company sure um thank you patrick and happy anniversary um okay so we had about 30 forms that we needed to convert uh we are on-prem um and going to go to the cloud soon so i'm very interested in in this webinar as well so um in the middle of converting and migrating to forms viewer we had a patch that happened with microsoft that made us kind of have to decrease our amount of time that we had to spend on this but um overall it was a good experience um patrick and his team were very helpful and they provided us with lots of tools so the tool to convert the udcx files worked very well because we had a lot of those most of our data connections were udcx files and then we had a lot of um i needed the help team a lot during this time and became really good friends with hillary and others um so everybody was very responsive so that was really awesome started like in june i want to say maybe end of may yeah and and how many forms have 30 forms and you got all them all migrated are they all live in the new environment i am making the last two little forms live this weekend and then i have one giant form that i'm still developing any you want to show people one of your forms yeah sure i've got a couple of them because i just wanted to show um just trying to get to the right spot where i want to be okay here's my show my screen okay so this is just a real simple form let me know when you can see it yep that's it okay so this was a real simple form i did put a little bit of bells and whistles on it um i added the um debug slider which is very helpful when you you know we kind of hide it from everybody else but the the developers can see it and you can see that and you get the dynamic data connections there too i can see it right there the first command get the input yeah yeah we've got some some good data connections going on the one thing that we did a little different is we put all of our resource files which are the css files and the jquery and the j javascript we put those kind of centralized and your team helped with that you know getting that all set up for us so that if we wanted to change some css we would only have to change it once as opposed to go to every form and change that's really cool we need to do a webinar on that so um the other thing i added on here was uh field validation which is very helpful and um [Music] that way if they forget to fill out a form because the little little red star just isn't that helpful and before we had everything highlighted yellow that they had to fill out and i just hated the way it looked um so by having the field validation we're able to make this a quicker and nice nicer looking form i think and the other thing i wanted to show was how quick it actually loads um i think it's almost like a second oh that's great wow so yeah it loads yeah it loads very nicely uh it seemed like it was loading faster before i was on the webinar but that's okay what was it like before you moved to forms here i'm really not sure on this one because it's uh not one that i developed but i would i would guess it was probably three seconds at least three or four so it's definitely faster it's definitely faster and bakerbots is a major law firm in the houston area is that right yeah we have around 1500 employees um and we're uh international so we have people using the forms in you know other countries as well so this is one form i kind of want to show just because i threw everything at it i have the hamburger which will slide in and out this little area now um after developing it and showing it to the customer for so long they're like oh we want that little panel open once you load the form i was like okay so i had to go into the css figure out how to do that and and it's working just fine or into the javascript actually and so um the other things i did with this uh let's see i've added these little next buttons and okay so here's the next little kind of bells and whistle is the search i'm not going to search for one of our clients but i will search for one of our lawyers and so you just have to put in a few letters enter and it then finds it and you select it and that's going to dbxl so i created a query in dbxl created a um data yeah data connection i can't even think and um to the to dbxl and it works great it makes the form load much faster because we don't have to load up all of the um lawyers and every single time it would have to lloyd load all of the lawyers and that would just be it would slow the it slowed the form down tremendously so this helps make it a lot faster and the clients works the same way it just um searches our client database that's great that's great um so then another thing i threw at that well i have field validation on that so if somebody puts in uh letters here it'll validate if they put in you know 500 it'll validate and then if they finally go over a thousand dollars it'll take it so that's helpful i'm trying to think of the other cool things we have this is a searching our um crm so we could just do texas bar do a search so that's connecting with an api that's fast and that's the the query again as well right no this is an api actually okay cool yeah yeah so that does that so we've got a little bit of everything going on here exciting that's great um yeah people are pretty happy that the users are are okay type in the three characters and tabbing out they're not well this will be the first time it's not like this is the one i'm still developing so it's not live yet our cut the people that are um you know kind of rolling it out to the lawyers have tested it and they haven't seem to have a problem with it the only thing they do have a problem with um is let's say i come here and like i did barkley um and there's only one just just as a little thing for you guys to think about uh if there's only one they would like for it to be selected automatically yeah any questions yeah this is a great stan this is so thank you so much for being here today in our webinar yeah um but it's been it's been um you know tedious to get it all done but uh with the help of your people and uh team and uh you know their dedication as well it's it's made it a lot smoother and a lot easier on me and you know hillary can talk me down when i get when i get frantic that's great to hear um any questions for suzanne before we uh go back to mel and see how to add these data make these data connections dynamic anyone have any questions uh if if you would like to um to be on our webinar in the future um please let me know we'd be happy to have you demolish your forms to everyone else uh make it real um so i guess we don't have any questions suzanne i just want to thank you again for for being here today and and the wonderful uh um kind of overview of the process that you guys went through moving those 30 forms over yeah absolutely the one thing i did do um is i kind of just for the other developers i kind of you guys have great documentation as well so i kind of like summed it up and you know these are the steps you have to take when you're when you're converting a form so does that help you i don't have the idea do you want to show that uh i'd have to find it patrick i can't remember but it just becomes second nature it does become second nature once you've done a few of them it you know at first you're like oh my gosh there's so many little steps that you have to take but you know what what started out taking an hour or two to convert a form to 30 minutes you know so it does become second nature that's great to hear yeah yeah okay well wonderful thank you so much yeah it's great to have you here um and if you do have that that that the summary you want to say email me to me or whatever that'd be great too i'd love to okay it may not be perfect but there you go it'll be there all right all right thanks again um well now back to you um you want to walk people through how to make these data connections dynamic sure yeah i'd love to so we have two ways actually here we can manually add the rules which i'll show you more in more detail and we also provided this uh we're going to provide this reusable xml template for the x and e to make your lives easier all right so let me just show you an example of a form that we have that has that extra blue but before i show you that let me show you the template that doesn't have it so this one is i'm in the on-prem site and this form has data connections to my online site my office 365 site and let's just see what happens here on formload we get this error because it's trying to get the categories from the site from the my online office 365 site whereas it's published in my on-prem site right so the adding the xtp get gets rid of this error message then when i look at my end template here which already has that dynamic data connections xtp no more errors here and it instantly loads it loaded this this categories list here which i changed the drop down options to come from that list and if i look at the commands here we can see all the commands that the xdp had and these are arranged it even has the ability to change the submit url to automatically point to the sharepoint library that is present in wherever site you open the form from so the key thing is for forms to be able to detect which environment you're trying to open the forms from and that's with the help of the get input parameter command it determines the host url like right here and then changes to the connection based on that post url using the change connection url command and for any queries right and then the change submit your offer and submit and these are just rules in your form right you're just adding these as rules um that set the key roles command field is that right yeah setting the curls command field but the uh the xvp already has all those rules uh just yeah modification it's like those commands how they actually show up in the okay so that's the xtp and here let's just open the end template for that expense report form if i go into cadabra rules so here it says run dynamic vcs so just set the xdp nodes xcp know this one here to to trigger that and here are the comments here so here's our get input parameter um setting the sharepoint site url and then we change the connections using setting another node here which then has these rules that you just need to enable and disable so there are documentations there's a documentation on how to use this and we'll provide it in the sample how long do you think it takes in general to i mean we've got this xtp for customers that have forms of lots of data connections if they just had one or two data connections is that overkill i mean would they just be better off doing it manually yeah if they're the form only has one or two data connections we don't i don't recommend using this going through this um entire page of documentation to use the xcp all right you can just manually add it which i i want to focus actually on to teach you how to easily add those rules if you only have a couple of data connections but in this case the expense report formulas get user profile by name there's a sharepoint library and a list data connection there so this can be a good candidate where we want to use that xdp with less effort okay so let me let me show you the the nation's dashboard that's where i want to show you how you can manually add the rules but i'm not going to start from scratch here i'm just going to show you um in detail what this form is doing so in form load the we want the form to be able to determine the environment are you in dev are you in on prem office 365 right so that's the first rule that we're checking here and then we're changing whatever connection uh connections are there before we actually query the list right so in this case inquiring the donations listen before i do that i change the less data connections so determining the environment if i might go to my from logic node here again right here so you want to add like this kind of we're centralizing the the logic so we have these form logic notes too it's a lot easier and less maintenance this way so we set this no to just trigger and then we have the host url node and then an environment so we determine the whole post url again they usually get input parameter you can use this key and it returns your your host url obviously so here i'm just uh adding the setcase command just because some sites can have different casing and you might end up having issues determining your actual environment if you're in depth versus fraud and whatnot so i'm just using the the this command here to make sure that everything's in lower i've never seen that before oh it's been a long time so yeah and then we set the environment to dynamically this is one of the dynamic rules in there we set the dynamic the environment from where the site location where this site is equal to whatever i got from that host url okay i'm going to show you the form logic behind this actually i should have have it ready but um you should export that real quick for you i deleted it before games because here here we go so here i just have these two notes where i enter my site location so these are my um yeah this is simulating two different um environment my test and my broad so here you'll see they are in different urls and that's actually in the my third third agenda today which is me even being able to switch between environments so that's why i have those kind of environment and host url and whatnot so that's just uh that also falls into the bonus but again back here after you determine your environment so to speak uh you go back to the change connection url here change list uh uh changing the list connection so all all there is to it it's just passing in the parameters the data connection name which is donations and then your host url which you dynamically obtained from that previous role and then the name of your list which is required in cases where you're changing a list data connection you show that the command in the command builder and just to give people an idea of where they would go to figure out what the parameters for change connection url are there yeah the classic designer we we also have this the new beta designer which which has the the dynamic data connection xtp in it i'll show that after mel is done here um but if you are wondering well you're not quite sure how to create these commands we have this command builder here that you can use to to quickly create the the string the command string that you would then use in the rule and that's what i'm doing right here cool yes i'm just pointing these guys to where they should be and at the bottom here it's automatically providing you the actual strength of these dynamic steps now you said that you were you were going to show a bonus of how you went from test to prod but i you have these urls hard coded in the form logic and that's kind of what we're trying to get away from so i'm kind of confused yeah actually um there could be a different uh different approach to how your environments are set up so in this case i have this because i have different uh sub sites for my different environments but there could be something like training slash forms dev versus training slash forms right in that case you won't need you won't need this hard-coded thing you just append the host url the dynamic host url that you got and append it with the actual environment value right so in this just in the scenario i need to i can't contain this dynamically if you may but let me show you how that works in the in the browser here in the forms viewer so here i am opening it from our 1908 site i'll show this not only the nation's dashboard is what i want so yeah so this is coming from the 20 of my 1908 forms viewer site and here i set one of the items to this so we know that it's coming from tess so if i look into the debug here it says our environment is test right and it's f coming from fb 1908 but i have this button here that says switch to prod because right now i'm on test but if i click on that now my environment changes to fraud and my site here is now fb 2004 2004 and one of the items i changed from from broad just for me to know that it's actually coming from fraud but the um the the idea is i have these site assets these lists existing in both sites my site and my site b and i can play with different data i don't want to touch the production data because it's live right but i have this tiny change that i made into the template that i want to be able to test before i actually launch it to pride so i i do this first so you're testing fraud in the form this opening from from tests like the they're basically having the form point to the prod site so you can just test the data is that right exactly yeah using something it's a template playing around with different sets of data awesome yeah fantastic any questions for mel i know you uh did everything but we've been doing this dynamic data connection stuff for quite a long time it was the first uh in fact let me just quickly share my screen and just show uh everyone the forms designer here this is uh we're hoping to finish up the forms designer uh soon and what that means is 1.0 right now we demoed this this is available you can download it install it and you'll notice that there is dynamic data connections here in the forms designer so the only xtp that we've baked in right now is that dynamic data connection and if you click on it um i believe let me just see if i can uh put my cursor somewhere where i can add it here i don't know if where to add it it doesn't really matter i can click add here okay so i guess maybe it's already been added to this template but um if you haven't added it it will add it and then you can um go through and see the instructions now these instructions are not quite as good as what we're going to send you with with the webinar package in the presentation the slides we've got a little better pdf but this is just kind of a backup um to walk you through it these are steps you need to take to fix up the data connections i i guess it would take about 10 minutes mill what's your guess is 20 minutes is that is that the range 10 to 20 minutes and this we we did feature this during our uh training in april so if you have the form designer and you want to actually walk through it you can go to our downloads page here and on the right kia performance 20-21 this is this first lab that we did in this training was to uh introduce the form designer and and do the data connection that's the second lab i guess so you can download this and walk through that and there's videos on this as well so encourage you to take a look at that um doesn't look like we have any questions um so mel i wanna thank you again for presenting this wonderful webinar we did today and uh thank you suzanne for being here and uh i hope everyone has a great day we'll do this again uh in a couple weeks we're going to be talking maybe we'll talk about centralizing css that's a great idea as his hand and um i hope everyone has a great day uh and let us know if you need help on the migrations or if you got a new form you want to add some extra stuff to we'd be happy to to help you thanks again take care yeah everybody thanks patrick

Channel: qdabra

Views: 32

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 0QCp2MJ-Pkk

Length: 30min 54sec (1854 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021