A Managed Document Center – Part IV

This is the fourth and last of a series of post about creating a Managed Document Center in SharePoint Online. The purpose is to create a document center that it is able to route and rename uploaded documents to their respective folder based on metadata associated with it. To see a full description of the resultant product, click here.

As mentioned on the previous posts, I have divided the job in the following steps:

1. Create the necessary Term Sets in the Term Store. 
2. Create a new site using the Document Center template. 
3. Enable and set up the Content Organizer. 
4. Create a site Content Type using Document as Parent Content Type. 
5. Edit the default Documents library with the columns and views needed. 
6. Create a workflow to rename the documents. 
7. Save the Documents library as template and create a new document library for each facility. 
8. Create Content Organizing rules to route the documents to his final location. 
9. Redirect the default “Upload a Document” button to the Drop Off Library. 

To see step 1 click here. To see steps 2 to 5, click here. To see step 6, click here.

7. Save the Documents library as template and create a new document library for each facility.

Go to the Documents library and click on the Library Settings icon in the ribbon. Then under Permissions and Management click on Save document library as template. Type a name for the file and a template name, in this case I will named it Managed Document Center. A description is optional, but it is a good idea to provide one, so it will show up in the right part when you create a new library. Leave the Include content check box unchecked.

Once you click OK, SharePoint will show you the following screen:

Click OK to continue. Then let’s start creating the document libraries for our different facilities.

On the navigation pane at the left of the screen, click on All Site Content. Then, click on the Create button at the top.

Within the new window, filter by library type in the left side, then choose the newly created template Managed Document Center. Note that the description will be displayed in the right side. Type the name of our first facility and click on Create.

Repeat this last process to create a document library for all the facilities. At this point you can hide the Documents library from the navigation pane, by going to its settings page, clicking in Title, description and navigation and selecting No on the Display this document library at the Quick Launch? question.

8. Create Content Organizing rules to route the documents to his final location.

We have activated the Content Organizer in step 3. Now, we are going to define rules to route documents to their respective libraries based on the entered metadata.

Go to the site settings and under Site Administration, click on Content Organizer Rules. Then, click on Add new item.

In the Content Organizer Rules: New Rule window, type a name for the first rule, in our case, I will use the name of the first facility. Leave the rule status and priority with their default values. Under Content Type Group select Custom Content Types and select Managed Document for the content type.  In the Conditions section, select the property Facility, operator is equal to and choose the name of the first facility for the value. Finally, select the facility’s document library as the Target Location.

Repeat this process to create rules for all the facilities.

You can test the rules by going to the Drop Off Library and uploading a document there. After the document has been uploaded, you’ll be asked to fill out the metadata we configured and the document will be routed based on the facility field:

9. Redirect the default “Upload a Document” button to the Drop Off Library.

When we created the site using the Document Center template, the initial page includes a welcome message with a button to upload a document.

This button saves the document in the Documents library, which is currently hidden in our managed document center.  In this step, we are going to change the target of that button to save the documents in the Drop Off Library, so the rules of the content organizer can be applied.

To do this, click on the Edit Page icon that is in the Page tab in the ribbon.

Note that the button is part of a Content Web Part. Click on it and click on the HTML button in the ribbon and then select Edit HTML Source.

On the HTML Source windows replace the following code:

<div class="ms-uploadbtnlink"><button onclick="javascript:OpenNewFormUrl(&#39;Documents/Forms/upload.aspx&#39;);return false;" type="submit"><nobr><img alt="Upload a Document" src="/_layouts/Images/uploaddoc.png"/>&#160;<span>Upload a Document</span></nobr></button> </div>

With this one:

<div class="ms-uploadbtnlink"><button onclick="javascript:OpenNewFormUrl(&#39;DropOffLibrary/Forms/upload.aspx&#39;);return false;" type="submit"><nobr><img alt="Upload a Document" src="/_layouts/Images/uploaddoc.png"/>&#160;<span>Upload a Document</span></nobr></button> </div>

Note that I just changed the word Documents by DropOffLibrary.

Now, users can upload documents directly from the hope page of our Managed Document Center.

Summarizing

In this series of post we have configured an automated solution that allows users to upload document from a centralized location. The document will be routed and renamed based on the metadata attached to them.

I recommend to use the Metadata navigation settings on the document libraries to have an easy way for users to filter and located the content documents. I didn’t included that feature on the template, because these option are not saved as part of the template.

Hope your enjoyed this series of posts! 

A Managed Document Center – Part III

This is the third of a series of posts about creating a Managed Document Center in SharePoint Online. The purpose is to create a document center that is able to route and rename uploaded documents to their respective folders based on metadata associated with them. To see a full description of the resultant product, click here.

As mentioned on the previous posts, I have divided the job in the following steps:

1. Create the necessary Term Sets in the Term Store. 
2. Create a new site using the Document Center template. 
3. Enable and set up the Content Organizer. 
4. Create a site Content Type using Document as Parent Content Type. 
5. Edit the default Documents library with the columns and views needed. 
6. Create a workflow to rename the documents. 
7. Save the Documents library as template and create a new document library for each facility. 
8. Create Content Organizing rules to route the documents to his final location. 
9. Redirect the default “Upload a Document” button to the Drop Off Library.

To see step 1 click here. To see steps 2 to 5, click here. In this post I will cover step 6.

5. Create a workflow to rename the documents

The managed metadata columns in SharePoint have some limitation as listed by Michael Pisarek in this post. One of these limitations is that we cannot use them in formulas and they also need to be trimmed in order to get the correct string to be used as the name of the document.

My first initial though was to develop custom code in order to get this operation to work, but custom code is always our “last resource”, because our idea on each solution we provide is to be easily replicable. So I came out with a solution using a workflow.

We are going to need SharePoint Designer to create this workflow. Click on Site Settings > Edit in SharePoint Designer in order to open SharePoint Designer. If you don’t have it already installed, you’ll be prompted to download it and install it.

Once in the SharePoint Designer main page, click on List and Libraries on Site Objects panel the left, and the open Documents on the right panel.

On the Documents page, under the Workflows section, click on New...

Name the workflow as Rename Documents. A new workflow in edit mode will be showed with an empty Step 1. Click on it and click on Action in the ribbon, select Update List Item. Click on this list field and in the Update List Item dialog, leave List as Current Item. Click in the Add button and select the values as the following image:

Click OK twice to close the open dialogs and click the Save button. Next, on the navigation bar at the top of the workflow editor, click on Rename Documents to see the properties of the workflow, then, under Start Options check the options to start automatically the workflow when an item is created and when an item is changed.

 Click on the Save and then the Publish button in the ribbon.

Now, let’s go back to our Documents library in SharePoint and let’s upload a document. If you take a look to the Rename Documents column in the library right after uploading the document, you’ll see that it says that an error has occurred. If you click on the error, you will find that the information provided by SharePoint is not clear. So, as a matter of test, let’s go back to SharePoint Designer and edit the workflow to update the Title instead of the Path and Name to see what the outcome would be. Save and publish the workflow and upload a new document.

The workflow now has completed successfully  but if we check its properties, we will see that the title has the product name, the pipe character and the GUID of the managed metadata tag. The pipe character is not allowed as a file name, that’s why the workflow errors out. We also don’t want to include that GUID as part of the document name.

We need to trim the product and the document type columns, but unfortunately SharePoint Designed doesn't include support for common string functions. We could do it directly in SharePoint using a calculated column, but calculated columns don’t work with managed metadata. The approach we will use is to create a set of temporary columns where to put that data and work around these limitations.

Back in SharePoint, go to the Library Settings of the Documents library. Under Columns, create two single text columns called tempProduct_raw and tempDocumentType_raw with any string as default value. Don’t add them to the content types and or the default view.

These two columns will be used by the workflow to store the raw string composed by the product name or document type plus the pipe character plus the GUID.

Now, create a new calculated column called tempProduct_name with the following text as formula:

=LEFT(tempProduct_raw,FIND("|",tempProduct_raw)-1)

Don’t add it to the content types or default view.

Create another calculated column called tempDocumentType_name similar to the previous one with the following formula:

=LEFT(tempDocumentType_raw,FIND("|",tempDocumentType_raw)-1)

These two new calculated columns will remove the pipe character and the GUID from the product and document type respectively.

Let's go back to SharePoint Designer and edit our workflow. The first step will update the tempProduct_raw and tempDocumentType_raw columns with the values of the product and document type columns respectively. You may need to refresh SharePoint Designer in order to see the recently created columns.

Now, add a new step after Step 1 and select the Pause for Duration action in the ribbon. Edit it to pause for 0.5 minutes. This step is necessary to give SharePoint enough time to calculate the value of the calculated columns.

Next add a third step after Step 2 and select Update List Item from the action in the ribbon. Edit the Path and Name field with the following string:

The final workflow will look similar to this:

Save it and publish it. Back in SharePoint, upload a new document to test it. Right after uploading the document, the Rename Documents column will indicate that the workflow is still in progress, wait a few seconds and refresh the screen to see that the name of the document has actually changed.

I hope you enjoyed this post!