TeamDesk Knowledge Base & Support

Slava Shinderov  Staff  9/11/2012 4:29:29 PM

@Shem I can't see any relation between an "assignments" and ability to know when document has been downloaded.
Can you give us more details on what kind of problem you're trying to solve?
From our stand point you may generate document as often as needed because it's always be the same if record is unchanged.
So who cares what happens with generated word document?

Simon Petralli 9/11/2012 5:07:17 PM

@Slava In some cases, the first time you print a document is the original and the next times are copies. Or simply you want to know if the document was downloaded at least one time.

Shem Sargent 9/11/2012 6:36:39 PM

@Simon, precisely the kind of scenario I have. I need the user to print the document before moving on to the next step in the workflow.

@Slava, I need the act of downloading the document to change the record.

Slava Shinderov  Staff  9/12/2012 3:18:35 AM

I suggest you to implement the following:
Create the custom button which tracks everything you need through assignments or workflow actions and changes the status of a record to move it to the next step in your workflow.
Modify your document filter condition to display it only after the button was pressed (for example by checking record status).
This way you'll be able to keep it under control because there is no way to know if the generated document was saved or printed and even was downloaded from our side.

Shem Sargent 9/12/2012 7:05:15 AM

@Slava, that is what I have been doing. It forces the user to tell the program that the program just downloaded something. The user naturally assumes the program should be able to track this. The user thinks 'why do I have to do this extra step? What a dumb program.' This is the actual user feedback that I have gotten.

This could be overcome by allowing button actions to fire off a URL.

On reflection, this is really only a design issue in my case because we cannot print batches of documents, so the users
need to know if a certain document has been printed for certain record.

martin oliver 9/12/2012 7:10:02 AM

Another reason would be from a security standpoint. An original may be the only legal document, but currently any number of copies can be printed with no control. These reprints may be used illegally. Some count of copies printed would be useful.

Kirill Bondar  Staff  9/12/2012 7:46:13 AM

@martin: Once the document is opened in Word the user can press print button multiple times or print multiple copies at once - it is out of our control.

Simon Petralli 9/12/2012 10:44:37 AM

@kirill: yes, of course. but at least with the assignments, the second time you download the document, you could display a watermark like "copy".

martin oliver 9/14/2012 4:58:33 AM

Is WORD the only document option currently

Kirill Bondar  Staff  9/14/2012 6:32:58 AM

@Simon - "you could display a watermark like "copy".

After the user opens the "legal" copy of the document she can print it multiple times, save or send it somewhere for later printing, or, with some technical skills modify the content that otherwise appears read-only.

On the other side the user can open the document, send it to the printer, close it - while the printer is doing the job and then discover, say, paper was jammed or the cartridge is empty. The user needs to re-print the document but there is no way to do it since after the document was loaded the record moved to another state.

A decade ago, while I was working for another company, we were trying to solve similar task; but in this case it was a desktop application tied to customer's environment and we were controlling the whole process from button click to a printer state - unfortunately, web applications like TeamDesk have no such level of control.

To me, Slava is right - there should be two separate record states - one to allow printing the document and another to indicate the user is done with it and no "legal" document should be printed afterwards.

Regards,
Kirill

Kirill Bondar  Staff  9/14/2012 6:35:32 AM

@martin: the idea to generate PDFs instead of DOCX pops up from time to time but we doubt high quality solution is possible at the moment. You can check the discussion here: Support for server-side document generation