I’m just curious on what to do here. We’ve got Docstar, and when a document is added to a PO or SO it associates that attachment with that PO or SO.
We are using the ICPO process, and want to be able to send documents from the PO in one company to the SO in the other company.
Would that be done within Epicor itself? Or do I do something with Epicor to trigger a workflow in Docstar? I haven’t looked much into Docstar outside of storing documents and APR. So I’m not sure what the best route would be.
I see there is an IMXFileAttch table, so is there already a mechanism for moving documents between companies? (Multi-Company Direct process).
@Doug.C That’s a very interesting idea. We do the the IC trading (sort of) and the ECM part, but I’ve not explored the idea of duplicating or linking the ECM docs on both sides of the equation.
My first idea on this would be to do a BPM that ‘copies’ the attachment link (from Ice.XFileRef and Ice.XFileAttach) on the PO to the SO - but this would have to be done from the SO side since you need the SO transaction before you attach the document. Those tables are pretty straightforward so I think this would be a pretty simple BPM.
But that might not be enough. You couldn’t search by the SO in ECM and find the attachment because ECM wouldn’t have indexed it and attachment back/from Epicor. You may actually want the BPM to call the BO for documents attachments - but I’m not sure how that would work because you’re not really working with the document/file itself, only the link to the document on the PO.
Alternatively, do you have the ECM API? Because now we’re getting to something really cool if the BPM could call the ECM API’s to take the doc from the PO and submit it as a new DocType and attach it back to the SO… but that is duplicating the document which isn’t a great idea… or maybe it can only attach it back to the SO without duplicating or changing DocType…
I would be very curious with what you come up with!!
The issue with the BPM is the path couldn’t be the same because they are stored in different directory structures. \EPIC03\General############## versus \EPIC06\General###############.
I was actually thinking it could be done with the custom code widget - and I thought it could do cross-company transactions when specifically passing a company param - but I’ve never done that really so I’m not sure.
@Doug.C You could do this similar to how IDC drops an xml file and pdf that are picked up with a import and added to ECM and attached to Epicor. I am actually try to figure out that import now. I know it reads the xml file and maps the fields, but it also grabs the pdf behind the scenes which appears in the workflow, but I do not know how that process works.
You could also just drop the pdf with a file name of where it needed to attach and have a simple workflow to parse the name and call attach to ERP.
The link below uses the AttachmentBO which has download and upload, but there is no company referenced.
My understanding (which may be incorrect) is that DocStar sees the document (pdf, jpg, etc.) and looks for a file with the same name but with an .xml extension to get the metadata which can then be used for workflows, etc.
@Mark_Wonsil I did some testing and read the page for the xml and csv imports. This is mostly guessing, but appears to hold. If there is not a file name column of field in the file it will grab one file that has a matching name. I did tests with an xml, pdf, docx, tif and png. The xml and one other document based on extension order will get uploaded.
@Mark_Wonsil You are both correct and incorrect, simply depending on method. You can set up the ECM workstation client service to monitor a file drop location and initiate a workflow without an associated XML. The XML file gives the metadata so a workflow is unnecessary, but without a workflow you cannot get the attachment linked back to Epicor, so some combination of file drop monitoring, XML file, document name parsing, and workflow could be used to create a universal solution to some extent.
@Doug.C I found https://help.docstar.com just searching and that is where DocStar support will also point you. On EpicLearning there are a lot of videos. There is also Guided Learning which I found by searching help.docstar on EpicCare.
EDIT: There is also DocStar-Batch-Import-Guide-v2.1.pdf which is a pdf of the video Mark linked to.
@Doug.C You can find user guides on ecm here. I downloaded them all and just started reading to see if there were any nuggets of wisdom I could pickup without have to bug @MikeGross
True. But I believe this is what IDC does so one doesn’t have to do the OCR in known locations. The. XML is not required but it certainly makes the workflows more reliable. We’ve been having a terrible time lately with barcode reading for some reason.
Yes the xml helps. We have one that will be nothing but a folder and document name combination, which will be enough for the workflow and data link to fully index and attach to Epicor.
A lot of variety in what you can do is what makes the ECM/IDC combo so fun to work with.
I am just too cheap or scared of running out of my IDC counts to use IDC on anything other than AP Automation until I have a least 6 months of processing done to be sure I won’t go over.
So, without knowing anything I’m talking about, I could create a document that can be used by a workflow that could be matched to the resulting sales order in the receiving company? I could trigger it off of the linked SO field being updated on the OrderHed via a BPM…