Send a web form to end users

Key Concepts

• Configuring an Email: Send Web Form action
• What happens to the Workflow while the email action is running?

Autogenerated Transcript

Welcome back to Catalytic in our last video, we went over how to add a webform trigger in our Workflow.

So we have a way to kick off a process after submitting information.

This is again, just a simple purchase order process we’re creating that will send this information to somebody via email and allow them to approve or deny and respond via a webform.

Now that we have our trigger set up in a webform configured, let’s go ahead and add an action.

I’m going to hop back into our Workflow and I’m just going to close the triggers and field section.

The action we want is an email action called Send a webform.

Again, because Catalytic is a no code platform, all we have to do is describe what we want to happen.

So I’m going to go ahead and type out the process we want to occur.

In this case, it’s going to be email webform, for response.

I’ll go ahead and hit enter.

And then Catalytic is going to see if there’s any steps or actions that is very similar to what I tried to describe here.

In which case it did pull back the action of email sent a webform.

Now there’s two main parts to configuring this step.

The first is configuring the actual email that we want to send and who we want to send it to.

And then configuring the webform that we’ll be sending, similar to when we set up our trigger.

And we’re able to add a form title, instructions, fields, etc.

We’ll get back to the form fields at the top in a minute.

But first, let’s configure the rest of this email.

For simplicity, we’re just going to make sure that the email gets sent to the person who kicked off this Workflow.

So that way, while we’re testing it, it’s easy to figure out what’s actually happening and see the emails that come through.

So what I’m gonna do is just expand the global fields on the right side.

And similar to last time, we’re going to go ahead and copy run owner email.

And we’re gonna go ahead and paste that into the to address here.

For the sender name, I’m just going to keep it as Catalytic, but feel free to have that be whatever value you want.

And for the email subject, I’m gonna keep it simple and call it purchase order submitted.

And I’m just going to type out the actual email body.

So we’re just going to say hello, a purchase order has been submitted.

And there’s going to be a link at the bottom of this that will navigate you to a webform, which will allow you to approve or deny it.

And just sign that off with the things.

I’m going to keep the email footer attachments and the custom reply to email address blank.

And now we’re going to go ahead and configure the actual webform that we’ll be sending via this email.

I mean continue to keep things simple for the form title, so we’re just going to call it purchase order information.

And now we’re going to go ahead and add the form instructions that will appear at the top of our form.

So we can just indicate that we need them to review the following purchase order information, and let us know whether it is approved or denied.

Now I’m going to go ahead and keep the rest of these fields blank for configuring the webform.

And now we can go ahead and actually set up the form fields, we can display the information that has been submitted, there’s a few different ways that we could actually display this information.

The first would be having that info being copied and pasted via these global fields or field references into our email body.

But I’m going to make sure that all the information is actually displayed on the webform.

So we could show how to set those up and what referencing an existing field does.

I’m gonna go ahead and click on add a field.

And then at the top of this, you’re gonna notice that the Create a new field is actually a drop down.

So instead of making a new field and then using a field reference to pass that information that we submitted into our new one, we could just go ahead and select an existing field, and then whatever was submitted would just automatically populate here, so it’s really just saving us some time.

So we have an easier way to display that information via this web form we’re creating.

So I’m gonna go ahead and go in order and select all of these existing fields for this web form we’re creating.

So now I’m just gonna add the rest of the fields again, just selecting an existing field for all of them.

So we’re gonna make sure we add the email.

Next will be the mailing address.

After that will be the actual item.

Next will be the quantity and again, we’re just going in order to make sure it’s in the same order as the actual webform for that purchase order submission.

So now we’re gonna go with quantity.

Next, we’re going to choose total cost.

And lastly, we’re going to select needed by now that we have it set up so that all the information submitted will be displayed.

Let’s go ahead and add a few more fields so we can get feedback from the approver similar to the pattern we set up in our last video.

So I’m going to go ahead and add a new field.

And this is going to be called approved.

And it is going to be a single choice of again, yes or no.

Okay, cool.

So let’s just go ahead and hit Save.

And now for our last field, we’re going to add any comments or feedback based off of if it is denied.

So now we’re going to add another field.

And let’s just call this feedback.

Again, we’ll keep it as long text in case there’s any formatting we want to save.

And now over in our Advanced tab, here, we’re going to go ahead and add a condition, we’re gonna build a business rule based off of that approve field.

So that way, we could just get any feedback back to the submitter when it’s denied, or just store any commentary in case it is denied.

So let’s add a condition.

And we’re gonna say if the field approved, is equal to the field choice of No.

Now I’m just gonna go ahead and save that.

And now we have our webform configured for this email step.

So I’m just gonna go ahead and save this.

And now we’re gonna go ahead and test our Workflow, or at least run it and make sure that it is working as intended.

So instead of using this test button, we’re actually just going to go ahead and fill out our form.

So we can go ahead and start an instance automatically once we submit this.

So I’m just going to go ahead and fill out the rest of this information like I’m actually submitting this form.

Again, if you remember that I put a default value on this name field.

So that’s why my name is already filled out here.

I’m gonna go ahead and input my email as well.

And the mailing address for Catalytics headquarters in Chicago, the item we’re gonna say we need a new computer monitors.

And the quantity we’re gonna say we want three of them, the total cost will be $1,000.

When do we need it by let’s just say by the end of the month, I’m gonna do is just click on this submit button now.

And then that will go ahead and trigger the rest of our process within Catalytic.

Now we can go ahead and navigate to the process page for this Workflow.

So we can see behind the scenes what’s actually happening.

So from our builder, I’m just going to click on the breadcrumb of back to Workflow here at the top.

And we’ll see that we had an instance automatically start as soon as we submitted that webform.

So long as you have permission to do so we can see what’s happening in real time with our process by just clicking on that instance.

And we’ll see that an email was sent to myself because I was the run owner that was inputted in that to address for our email step.

I’m gonna navigate over to my inbox where you can see that email came in with the information that we configured on our send a webform step.

So we have the body of this email and the link to actually open that webform with this Get Started button.

So I’m just going to go ahead and click on that.

So opening that link brought us to our purchase order information form where now we can indicate whether it is approved or denied.

So because we selected existing fields as the reference for this webform we sent, you’ll notice that all that information was automatically populated for each of the form fields that we have.

And then includes any of the configurations that we set up for this form fields.

As you can tell the instructions and example are here under this name field.

All I’m gonna do is just go ahead and fill out the Approve field.

So I’m going to select no.

And we’ll see that that feedback field appears because of the business rule that we built around it.

So I’m just going to leave some feedback.

Since we’re denying this we’ll just say you don’t need that many monitors.

And we’ll go ahead and submit this.

And that will go ahead and complete this process.

Now to make sure that it went through, we can go ahead and check our process run page and see that the entire Workflow is completed.

So the email webform was sent to us and then once we actually submitted that this Workflow was marked as complete.

This is a fairly simple purchase order process, but if we wanted to, we could email back the original submitter to notify them on if their purchase was approved or not similar to that pattern we built in video four.

Now that we know how to create and send web forms, the next video will be a similar process of a purchase order, but instead of sending a webform to the approver we’ll be generating a purchase order document that will get sent for a signature.

Thanks for tuning in.