Introduction

This document describes the steps required to utilise the Letter Generation and Mail Merging facilities incorporated into the KnowledgeWorker® Workflow Designer and Workflow Tasks when executing the workflow.

Letter Generation (sometimes called “Document Assembly”) can be used within an executing task to create either a single letter or document or to create a mail merge.

There are five basis steps: -

1. Create the category for the workflow which should contain all the required fields which will be inserted into the letter or document.
2. Create a category which will hold the bookmark mappings.
3. Create a word template which has the necessary bookmarks inserted into the text.
4. Map the bookmarks in the category defined in 2 above.
5. Configure the required task in the workflow to display and use the appropriate bookmark mappings.

Pre-Requisites

KnowledgeWorker® Version 3.1+ Server.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6+ on the client.

Microsoft Word 2000+ installed on the client.

Create Workflow Category

Following the instructions in the System Administration Guide, create a category as required for the workflow that you intend to develop.

In the example below, we have created a workflow category which will be used to process Billing Enquiries for a utility company.

Create Bookmark Category

Next, we create a category to hold the bookmark mappings. This is a simple category which holds only two fields. The first field holds the name of the letter or document. The second field holds the bookmark mappings and must always be called bookmark_mappings as shown below: 

The scope for the bookmark category should be set to Files.

The MS Word templates to be used in the workflow should be stored in the KnowledgeWorker® Library. For each document to be used, the category for the template should be set to match the bookmark category as shown below: 

The Document Name should be set so that it will be easy and logical for the workflow engine to search and find the correct templates.

For example, if there were three different kinds of Billing Enquiry letters, they could be named as “Bill Letter 1”, “Bill Letter Reject” and “Bill Letter Query”.

Using this naming convention, these three letter templates could be viewed by selecting a category search of: -

            Document Name [Starts with] “Bill”

This will become clearer when setting the Letter Generation feature within the Workflow Designer.

Create a Word Template with Bookmarks

Follow the instructions in the Microsoft Word© User Guide to create a word template by inserting bookmarks into the body of the document (as shown below).

Then upload the templates to be used in the workflow into the KnowledgeWorker® Library. For each document to be used, the category for the template should be set to match the bookmark category.

Map the Bookmarks

For each document which is catalogued using the bookmark category, the bookmark mappings must be set in the field Bookmark_Mappings (labelled bookmarks in the example below).

The bookmarks are entered as shown below.

• recipient:recip_name
• recipient1:recip_name
• balance:acct_bal
• date:l_date
• date1:l_date
• title:b_title
• address:b_add
• town:b_town
• county:b_county
• account:acct_num
• balance:acct_bal
• phone:p_number
• g_name:g_name
• job:j_title

The first field in each case is the name of the bookmark, followed by a separator “:” (colon) and then the name of the field in the category to which it is being mapped as shown below: -

            “name of bookmark”:”name of category field”

Configure the Workflow Task

Within the workflow designer, to enable the Letter Generation function, click on the Generate Letter button on the Custom Items tab.

In the Letter Generation dialogue box set the following values: -

Category – Set to the name of the bookmark category.

Attribute – Set to the name attribute in the bookmark category.

Operator – Set to any of the following values: -

Value – Set to value required to search (or find) the appropriate Word Templates to be offered for selection in the workflow task.

Workflow Execution

Using the example above, when the Billing Query workflow task is executed, the button Letter Generation is enabled within the task as shown below: -

When the Generate Letter button is pressed, the user is shown the required templates to select from.

The user is able to select the required template and submit for processing. KnowledgeWorker® then starts up MS Word, loads the template and substitutes all the bookmarks with the values in the corresponding workflow attributes which have been mapped in the bookmark category for the selected template.