Rock U - Workflows - Workflow Person Entry

Transcribed Video Content

Workflows are powerful and dynamic tools that you can use to do just about anything in Rock. And if you've ever created a workflow with a form, especially one that might be on your external site that visitors might use, you're definitely familiar with the need to gather information about the person as well as whatever information you need for the rest of the form. If you've ever built a workflow that asks for the person's first name, last name, phone number, you're gonna wanna know about the person entry feature in workflows because it makes it super easy to gather information about people or to let them skip that step entirely if Rock already knows who they are. Let's take a look at what it looks . So to start, we're gonna pull up a workflow with a form in it. So we're gonna go to admin tools, general settings, workflow configuration. And here we see the standard form action type, to get the initial input from the user. And so this is a standard form that gathers information, about a position. Maybe it's for a job application or for some sort of position approval. And if you're familiar with the form function, the form action type, then you're familiar with all these. But what you might not know about is this enable person entry feature. And so, we're gonna enable person entry. And as soon as we do, we get a lot of fields added to our page here. The person entry configuration starts with a pre HTML form, And then down at the bottom, there's a post HTML. And if you've used the form action before, then you'll know that that's pretty much the same as the form header and the form footer fields that you're used to seeing. You notice we have options about whether or not to show the person's campus, which we have enabled here. You can also auto fill the current person. If you have this enabled, the fields that you select down below here will be visible on the form, but the person won't have to fill them out because they'll already be prepopulated. So that might be a good way for the person to update their information if they need to. The alternative to that or another option that you can use is to hide the person entry fields if the person is known. So if we already know who they are, we're not gonna ask them for their name, their email address, all that stuff. They're just gonna skip that part entirely on the form. And then along the top here, last but not least, you also have the spouse entry. And the spouse entry can be hidden, optional, or required, which are the options that you have for these other items here. But for spouse entry, if you enable this by making it either optional or required, then there'll be a second set of fields for the spouse. So it'll ask for the person's first and last name, etcetera, and then the spouse's first and last name separately. Then down below, as you move down the fields, you can specify what it is that you wanna ask about the person. And so we can make gender required. We can make email required. Mobile phone is hidden. I'm gonna say that we're gonna make that optional so that they can give a mobile phone number if they want. I don't need a birthday for this workflow or an address. Or what? Maybe I will ask for an address. I'll make it optional. The marital status will hide. And then the spouse label, you can change it to something else depending on the workflow. You might wanna instead of spouse, , you might make it husband or wife or something that. But we'll just leave it as the generic spouse for right now. Now, of course, this is gathering information about a person. Right? Their their name, their email, their birthday, all these options are are about people. And so, if Rock needs to create a person based on this information, we're gonna need to know what should that person's connection status be. And I'm gonna put visitor for this workflow. Similarly, what should the record status be? And what? I'm gonna make it pending for this workflow. So, if a person record does get created, it'll be in a pending status. And then, since we're asking for an address, we need to know what address type, and I'm just gonna use the the work address. Down below, have different attributes, different workflow attributes that you can use to store the person, the spouse, or the family. So these would be two people attributes or a group attribute. And you can use this, we'll make it the requester, to store the person into a workflow attribute, to store their spouse into maybe a separate workflow attribute, and or to store the family into its own workflow attribute. So, I'm gonna go ahead and save this workflow and show you what it looks when a person actually uses it. When the person goes to complete the form, they'll see all the person entry fields that we configured right up here at the top. So we have the campus selection, first name and last name are always there and always required, The email address that we made required, the mobile phone that we made optional. Gender is required, and we have it populated with female. And we made the spouse fields optional, and so the person will be prevented with this little checkbox, show spouse. And if they do that, then we get the spouse fields over here as well. The spouse fields respect the same settings as the main person fields that we set up on our workflow actions. So if email is required for the person filling out the form, email is also required for the spouse. We also have the address field, which was the last part of the person entry options that we have. The actual workflow itself, the rest of the form, starts down here. Everything above this position title and position description is all person entry. And then they can fill out the rest of the form. For comparison's sake, I'm gonna come back to our workflow configuration, and I'm gonna enable the feature for hide if current person known. And if I do that, when I launch the exact same workflow, you'll notice that all of the person fields have been automatically taken away because the the system knows that this is Alicia Marble. It knows who she is. We don't need to ask for those. If it was somebody else, then we would see that Rock didn't know, then we would see those fields pop back in. But this one just starts with position title, we saw in the other example because we already know who the person is. So as you can see, the person entry feature is just as dynamic and flexible as workflows themselves, and you can make it work according to your needs. So if you've ever built workflows the old fashioned way where you need to ask for personal information by building out a bunch of attributes, then this is certainly welcome news. For more information on workflows in general, check out our other Rock You videos as well as the blasting off with workflows guide posted to our community website. Thanks for watching.