Dear readers, how are you?

My Loan calculator, I was working on last week has been a success. Everyone appreciated how easily and quickly, I could create a form with a large number of fields. Well, it’s all thanks to Infowise Ultimate Forms. Read more about it here.

Adding Business Logic and Automating the Process

As promised, I will today document the next steps for my calculator.

Once I completed the form with multiple fields, the stakeholders wanted to add some business processes and logic.  After a quick discussion, we wanted to create an auto-approval, if the loan met specific criteria’s. If it didn’t meet the requirements, the request needs to be approved or rejected by an approver. Once approved or refused the Loan Requestor receives an email with the status of his application. 

Auto-Approval for Personal Loan

Auto-approval is the process where you approve a request if it meets some specific requirements. In this case, we had two conditions:

1. The Loan requested is less than $1000
2. Salary of the requestor is more than $3000

Also, we need to run the same process if the application is modified.

This time I wanted to try Microsoft Power Automate, which was previously known as Flow. I logged in to the Power Automate Portal and created a Flow. 

Once the Flow was completed, with all the conditions and auto-approval, I explained it to my business team. However, with the connectors and the logics, they found it very difficult. Using Power Automate meant that in case of even a little bit of change, they had to go back to the developers.

We then tried the Business logic in Infowise ultimate forms. I was amazed by how easy and intuitive it is to create Business Logic with Infowise Forms. The User Interface is clean and easy to understand with checkboxes and tabs.

The things I loved were:

1. Tutorials and Documentations

The right side of the application has a large number of tutorials and documentation relevant to the screen. The tutorials help the user to check out the processes if they are unable to figure it out.

I came across a video tutorial, which described the process step by step, making my life so much easier. 

2. Availability of a large number of options to “Run on Events".

Any action gets triggered based on some event like an item is created or updated. While creating actions in Infowise ultimate forms, I have an option to choose the events my response will be based on. I can also select multiple options, allowing me to run the same actions on different occasions like New, Edit and Delete, reducing my work.

I like the option to create an action is an attachment is created or deleted. It can help to track if someone wants an attachment to reviewed or if someone deleted an attachment accidentally.

Timer-based Run on Events, allows us to run an action periodically. It is like a Timer Job and can be used to generate a report.

3. Availability of more Advanced Settings

I can choose more options from the “Advanced Setting” tab. Each option comes with a detailed explanation. Click on the "question mark" icon to check. 

Options that I can choose include:

• I can manually execute the process, which might be a perfect option while I am testing my workflow.
• I can also choose if the action is repeatable so that it executes every time I add a new item.
• I can Log results, which is useful for debugging.
• I can choose to stop the process if there is an error and send a message to the person responsible for the process, ensuring that immediate action can take place.
• I can allow people to execute the action, even if they don't have sufficient permission or stop then from triggering the reaction.
  
  

4. Action Settings: to define the actions easily with “AND” and “OR” Operator

Once I had identified the events on which the work will take place and the other settings, I could create the conditions and results. I can choose the site and list and add one or more columns with the "Values to set" options to define the values that will get updated if it meets the condition. The values can be set as texts or as values from different columns.

To set the condition, I can choose the columns from the dropdown and add them with “AND” or “OR” operator.

5. The only word of caution is that one needs to be a bit careful when setting up the conditions. Check out the Infowise Tutorial (https://www.infowisesolutions.com/training/article.aspx?ID=54), which defines how the system interprets the terms.
6. Import pre-defined actions

Infowise Actions also allows you to import actions that were defined before. If I already have action, I can import and reuse it for my current item.

I quickly added all the actions and my auto-approval started working. My business team could now add new conditions if they wanted to.

Email Approval for Personal Loans

In case the personal loans were not auto-approved, the next option was to create an email notification to the approvers to approve the loan. I used the Alerts option that I had used before for sending emails.

I just added the conditions and the emails started working.

Calculating Summary and Generating a Tracking report

Once the approval system was in place, I wanted to create an Approval Tracking report. Guess what I used to create my report: Infowise Ultimate Forms Actions. I created a list and three actions.

The first one is a timer-based event, which creates a new record with a date every day at 6 AM. This action will ensure that my next steps will be able to calculate the summary and update the list for that date.

Second and Third action items help to calculate the summary. So every time there is a new item in the personal loan list, it updates the number of loan items created. This process allows us to get a tracking report to understand the number of loans request made and the loans approved.

Further, we can use this tracking result to create graphs and charts to see which period has the most significant number of requests. Do let me know what you think about the Actions in Infowise Ultimate Forms as compared to the SharePoint Designer workflows or the Power Automate Workflows.