In Development: Dispatch (Record Assign/Un-Assign) Enhancements
We are currently working to develop some enhancements to our record assignment feature which will make for a more powerful work order management solution, and we’d love to hear from you and your team how we can mold it to our customer’s needs.
What is our goal?
We want to create a work order management solution that can meet your needs without having to create custom code or APIs. We want to simplify it while making it more robust.
What are we planning?
We are looking into a number of enhancements for dispatch including the ones outlined below:
- View record assignment history.
- View which user is currently assigned to a record.
- Unassigning a record would also remove the record from the device.
- Additional notifications for assigned records including custom messages
- Post Endpoint for when records are assigned.
- Possible Feature: User rights that allow certain users to assign/unassign records.
- Possible Feature: When deleting a record from the server, the record is also deleted from the device.
- Possible Feature: The ability to accept or reject the record assignment.
- Possible Feature: Alerts for records not completed in a certain amount of time.
We’d love to hear what you guys think.
- Do you think we’re on the right track?
- What are we missing?
- How will/do your teams use dispatch?
The more feedback we get, the better we can make this enhancement. Let us know!
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Updating assignment logic on the form would be nice too. I previously wanted a form that would, by default, be assigned to someone until certain conditions were met, and then would be assigned to no one (i.e. NULL). Not sure if it was a bug but I couldn't assign it to NULL (worked with support to confirm) after the record was assigned to someone. Instead I have to assign the records to an account that has access to the form (in my case my Access Provisioning admin account). Keep coming up with the great ideas!
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Hi Joe. Great to hear user rights would be helpful. Would you be able to share what specific user rights you are looking for here in your use case?
Scott, Thanks for sharing this workflow. Are you speaking in regards to certain forms where users would be assigned to collect data for this form at a certain time? Or is this in regards to assigning specific records out to users? Or a combination of both. If you can share any more details on this that would be great!
Keep the feedback coming!
-Ben
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Hi Ben, Hopefully the explanation of the use case helps. More details can be read in ticket id# 32199.
Form Need:
Needed a form for personnel sign-in/outs at a 24-hour site. Needed it to somehow accommodate daily server syncs while personnel where still onsite (re: signed-in).
Solution:
Using a conditional value, the form could assign records to the kiosk’s username if the record was not signed-out. Thus upon syncing, downloading the non-signed out records back to the kiosk for later editing by the user when signing out.
Problem:
Once a record is created and initially assigned, upon editing, I could not use the conditional value make the assignment equal NULL or “ “. Workaround: I assigned the signed-out record to a username other than the kiosk’s account. Note: wasn’t actually using iForm “Kiosk” addition. It was an iPad passed in/out of a truck by the gate guard.
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"I previously wanted a form that would, by default, be assigned to someone until certain conditions were met, and then would be assigned to no one (i.e. NULL)."
My agency would find this feature very helpful as well. The schema of our data has trip records in the parent form, followed by multiple subforms for data. For many projects, a trip record is one day surveying - for other projects, it may be 6 weeks. The problem with this schema in the standard iFormBuilder structure is that data is not synced until the entire relationship form structure is completed and the parent trip record is submitted. If a tablet is dropped halfway through a trip, all data is lost.
I have experimented with assigning a parent record back to the submitting user, as Scott mentions above - I set up a toggle field for "finished with trip" and set an Assign To element to dynamically assign it back to the same user if the toggle was not checked. The Toggle could also be set to only appear to the user when certain conditions were met, like the trip end date entered. The problem with this is that it the Toggle element is only evaluated ONCE. If the toggle is not checked and unchecked, the returned assigned record is not set to reassign to the same person.
I have considered setting up a service to listen for POST records coming in from parent forms, and reassign to the submitting user if the Toggle element is not checked. I would prefer not to have to go to this length if there is a way being developed to accommodate this workflow!
I put in a ticket for this and talked with my solutions engineer as well.
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Hi Scott and Bill,
Thanks for elaborating on this. So it sounds like what you want is a mechanism where you can put in a custom condition and have it keep re-assigning the record back if the condition is not met.
A service would be a great way to accomplish that now but something we will definitely take into account.
Would the condition of the toggle element be the same for this entire form or would different users have different tasks they need to complete before it will stop being re-assigned? Trying to get a feel for how configurable you are looking for this to be.
Thanks,
Ben
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The condition value would not need to be different depending on the user (if it need, I suppose I could vary the conditional statement based on the user). Basically just looking for a way to sync data from a form/subform structure before the parent record is fully completed. A checkbox for "Done with Trip" would suffice for this, and if necessary I could make the checkbox not appear until certain conditions were met (like entering a trip end time that was after the trip start).
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