HCM Processes & Forms: Initiate process from Offline Adobe Form

[Former Member]

In the HCM Processes and Forms framework, it is tradition that the form is initiated using the Start Application in the portal and then the workflow assigns the form to the next agent. In some cases you might want to start the process outside SAP with third party integration. This can be achieved with an offline Adobe form that can be filled out by the third party (such as a travel agent or recruiter), which will allow be enough information to start the process off without manually entering all the fields in the Start Application. This blog shows how this can be achieved with an Offline Adobe Form.

One of the most common scenarios is: Onboarding / Hire process. The employee is hired and he does not have access to the Start Application. The employee will be given an adobe form to fill in with all their details and will send it across to HR. Instead of HR entering all the details again to initiate the HCM process, they will simply initiate the process by uploading the form.

How to achieve this?

First, let us look at what usually happens with the Start Application.

• Firstly, you would select an object (for hire      process, skip this), then select a process.
• On clicking ‘Edit’, the initialize event is      triggered to initialize the form.
• Then you would enter the form data and click ‘Check      and Send’, which would trigger the check event
• In the Review step, clicking ‘Send’ would      trigger Send event. This event creates process object and triggers the      event for the workflow, which will assign the process to the next agent.

We just have to do the above steps in code while uploading the offline form. How simple is that! Thanks to the reusable components provided in the HCM Process and forms framework. It makes it even simpler. As a prototype, I created a webdynpro application to upload an Onboarding offline adobe form.

Below are the summarized steps on how to achieve this by using QISR_UI as used component:

• Create offline adobe form
  
  
• Create a Webdynpro component and use ‘QISR_UI’ as a used      component
• Create a view to browse and upload the offline form.
  
  

• Create a used component and set object id, process,      form scenario stage details. You can use the interface method      ‘set_external_data’ of component ‘QISR_UI’ component to do this.
• Call the initialize event. Use method      ‘call_isr_procee_event’ to call any event. This returns the processing      indicator to indicate if the event was successful or not. For the initialize      event, just pass the event name as ‘space’.
• Now extract the data from the adobe form and the      transfer data to the QISR_UI component. You can use method ‘set_special_data’      to do this.
• Call check event. This will check for any errors. If      the check is successful, the processing indicator returns a value of true.
• If the check is successful call the Send event. This      will create the process object and initiate the workflow.
  
  
• The manager will see the work item in their worklist.
  
  

Below is link to a recording of the process:

http://screencast.com/t/Ed5kycP7NsG1