Moving a Document to the SharePoint 2010 Records Center

In this article, we are going to build on the solution we have been working with over the last couple of weeks. You can review Part 1 and/or Part II at your convenience. In this installment, we are going to set up a simple one-step approval for the form and move it to a SharePoint 2010 Records Center once the form processing is complete.

The Approval Process

The first thing that we need to do is set up a simple approval process on our form. If you would like to follow along with us, please take some time to go through the first two articles references above. At the end of that exercise, you should have a working form that looks and performs just like the form that will be referenced herein.

For our example, it might make sense to have someone on the corporate Finance Team approve the discount form. To keep the example simple, we will assume that there is only one person on that team, so we can just deal with the individual and not worry about groups. Go ahead and create yourself an account in Active Directory for this user and add him/her as a contributor on the SharePoint site.

For the purposes of this example, I have created a user named Robert Nesta, with the account name / e-mail address rnesta@demo.sps.local.

Now we need to create an "Approval" section of our form. Insert a row in our display table for our form and then insert a "Section" control. Rename the section from "group1" to "approvalSection". Now, we are going to add a rule to hide the entire section unless the value in the "formStatus" field is "Pending Approval" or "Completed". Your Rules Pane should look something like this:

While we have the Rules Pane open, let's go ahead and make some changes to our existing form buttons. The form is currently set to only show the "Close" button (and hide the "Submit" and "Cancel" buttons) when "formStatus" is set to "Completed". We need to go ahead and add in the new "formStatus" value of "Pending Approval".

Click the text under the "Condition" section of the Rules Pane and then add in another condition, like so:

Do that for both the "Submit" and "Cancel" buttons. Let's leave the "Close" button alone for now. Make sure to use the "or" descriptor. It is set to use "and" by default. Now we are ready to add some controls into our approval section.

Let's add in a Drop Down List for the user to Approve or Deny the discount form, a field where they can post Comments, and a couple of buttons just like the section at the top of the form. For this example, I am going to name the controls:

When it's time to create the buttons, highlight the buttons on the top part of the form, hit Ctrl-C on your keyboard, click in the location where you want to create the new button, and hit Ctrl-V. Copy-and-paste. You have to love that.

When you are done creating those controls, let's go ahead and do a CUT-and-paste on the "Close" button to move it to the bottom of the form instead of its original location, which is now in the middle of the form.

When you are done creating these controls, the bottom of your form should look something like this:

At this point, make sure that you take a look at the rules for your two new buttons. You want to hide them when "formStatus = Completed" and show them when "formStatus = Pending Approval". Go ahead and make those changes now.

While we are making changes to button rules, there is one more change you need to make. On the "Submit" button in the top section of the form, you need to change the rule that sets the "formStatus" field. It should currently be set to change "formStatus" to "Completed". Change it to "Pending Approval."

Take some time right now to quickly check the rules on your new "Submit" button and make sure that the rule there is still setting the value of "formStatus" to "Completed".

The last step here is to set the value in our new Person/Group Picker when the first user submits the form. This field is how we are going to let the Assignee know that he/she must act on the form. The Person/Group Picker understands standard user account conventions (Display Name, DOMAIN\User, E-Mail Address, etc.) For this example, we will just go ahead and use the DOMAIN\User paradigm and set the AccountId field to "DEMO\rnesta".

That should be everything required, in terms of form changes. Go ahead and re-publish the form. Do not use the "Quick Publish" option. Click on the "File" tab, then "Publish", then click the "SharePoint Server" button.

We are not using the "Quick Publish" option because we are going to promote some of our new fields to the SharePoint Document Library. Click the "Next" button until you get to the screen to promote form fields. Add "formStatus", "financeApproval", "financeApprovalComments", and "Assignee" to the list. For the Assignee property promotion, select the "AccountId" field created for you as part of the Person/Group Picker and then name the property "Assignee".

Click "Next" one more time and then click "Publish".

Creating and Configuring the Records Center

First, we need to create a Records Center site. Go to your main site, click on "Site Actions" then "New Site". Select the "Records Center" template, give your site a name and click the "Create" button.

You should now be looking at your new Records Center site.

There are four more steps to configuring the Records Center to accept your InfoPath forms. First, you need to create a destination for your forms. Out of the box, the Records Center site template will only create the "Drop Off Library".

From your Records Center, click on "All Site Content" in the left-hand site navigation. Then click on "Create", select the "Document Library" template, give your library an intuitive name, and click the "Create" button. I named mine "Records Library".

The second step in configuring our Records Center is to make sure that our new library can accept our forms. If you followed the example over the last two weeks, your forms are using the generic "Form" content type. Since you should be looking at your freshly-created "Records Library", click the "Library Settings" icon toward the far right of the ribbon.

By default, the library is using one and only one content type, the generic "Document" content type. In order to let it accept other content types, click on "Advanced Settings" under the "General Settings" category. On the ensuing page, click "Yes" in the first section on the page, "Content Types". Click the "OK" button.