Hello all,I have a database where users can request items in it by pressing a button that will add their name to a field in the form of the item they want, then it will put that item into a folder.
The problem I am having is that I would like the unread marks to refresh on all open instances of the database, so that the person in charge of pulling the items can see that something has been requested. Is this possible?
I tried to create an agent that would refresh the folder every 5 minutes, but quickly found out that you can’t call UI functions in a scheduled agent. Being somewhat of a novice, I thought maybe the guru’s on this board might have some ideas of how this could be done.
Thanks for any help!
Cheers
Subject: Unread Marks
Miguel,
Unread marks aren’t going to help you, because they are stored on a per user and not a per database basis. That means that if one person out of a group are responsible, the unread marks won’t tell you if the item has actually been dealt with or not. Anyway, that isn’t really harnessing the power of Notes at automating workflows.
What I would do is create a status field on the document, and perhaps hide it in a access control section. Then when your users deal with the document, they can click a button or have a drop down to change the status. And instead of having them check the folder incessantly to see if a new item has been requested, create a simple action agent that sends an e-mail to the responsible parties when a new request is received.
But I would scrap the unread mark idea. they don’t work the way you think they do, and will cause more problems than they solve.
hth.
brandt
Subject: RE: Unread Marks
Thanks for your response Brandt, I was toying around with the idea of sending an e-mail when an item was requested, but scrapped it due to the high volume of requests. It’s too bad that unread marks won’t refresh across multiple instances of the database, I thought they would because if you close out the database and open it again, it works fine for any user… or if you manually refresh the database, it works also.
Well Thanks again.
Cheers
Subject: RE: Unread Marks
Miguel,
If the database is so high traffic, then you can scrap the e-mail notification and just stick with the status field–you would then build a view that is either categorized to show requests by status or create a view that only have the specific received but not yet processed status (whatever you want to call that.)
brandt
Subject: RE: Unread Marks
Yeah that is basically what I have with the folder view, I guess I will just have to have them incessantly check that view ; )
It’s not pretty, but it will have to work.
Thanks again for your help!