Designing Electronic Forms (SAP Library - SAP Business Workflow (BC-BMT-WFM))

Designing Electronic Forms

Purpose

An employee does not have a SAPGUI on his or her local PC but still wants to start a workflow, execute a work item, create a customer (BAPI call), or use an IDoc in the R/3 System. These activities should be possible both online and offline (for example, on an external notebook).

Prerequisites

You must install SAPforms. You also need a development environment for electronic forms (Visual Basic, MS Outlook, MS Word, or MS Excel). You must also be familiar with the functionality of the SAPforms Designer ( Getting Started).

Process Flow

To design an electronic form, you must work through the following steps:

In R/3:

Define a workflow, define a single-step task to be executed as a form, choose a BAPI or IDoc

Specific default settings are required for communication via mail. For more information, see SAPforms Administration.

In the form development environment:

Design the form

Designing forms with Visual Basic

Designing forms with MS Outlook

Designing forms with MS Word and MS Excel

Call the SAPforms Designer or

Include the submit control or

Call the SAPforms interface directly

In the SAPforms Designer:

Maintain the plug-ins

Define and generate the binding

Result

Once your form has been designed and processed by the SAP Forms Designer, you can make the form accessible to the end users.

Since SAPforms does not have its own mechanism for distributing forms to end users, you must either use existing mechanisms or create your own. For example, you can pull down your forms from public folders in Exchange or from your intranet.

Forms that are directly launched by the end user, for example a form starting a purchase requisition workflow, can be stored locally on the user’s PC.

Forms that are launched indirectly, for example by executing a work item in the R/3 System, are normally started via the SAPforms Helper . In this case, the forms must be stored in the active directory or under .../SAPforms/Forms.