Offline Microsoft Excel spreadsheets

An IBM® TRIRIGA® Offline form is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with fields on the sheet mapped to fields in an IBM TRIRIGA business object.

Through the mappings on this sheet, data in the IBM TRIRIGA application can be exported into an Excel sheet for review and updates, and data can be collected into the spreadsheet for import into the IBM TRIRIGA application. After the fields on the sheet are mapped to IBM TRIRIGA business object fields, workflow tasks can process this data in the application. This is useful for people who want to work with data in spreadsheets outside of the platform environment.

In order for the IBM TRIRIGA Application Platform to copy data into or out of an Excel spreadsheet, the spreadsheet must be in a binary field of a record. There are specialized workflow tasks for copying data into or out of a spreadsheet. In order for the specialized workflow tasks to work with an Excel spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is required to have a special organization.

Offline forms are best suited for handling small or moderate amounts of data. For large amounts of data, use one of the IBM TRIRIGA integration tools.

Note: If you are using the IBM TRIRIGA Connector for Offline Forms via Microsoft Exchange 2007, be sure to configure Plain text logon (Basic authentication) in Microsoft Exchange > Server Configuration > Client Access > IMAP4 Properties > Authentication tab.
The process flow in the following figure describes the outbound process.
Figure 1. Outbound Process Flow - Round trip
The image is explained in the text.
The process flow in the following figure describes the inbound process.
Figure 2. Inbound Process Flow - Staging table validation
The image is explained in the text.

Several components make up an IBM TRIRIGA Offline form. The steps to create an IBM TRIRIGA Offline form include the following:

  • Create the Excel template for a specific business object.
  • Create a Binary field definition in that business object. This is where the offline form instances will be stored a run time. See "Binary fields".
  • Define the IBM TRIRIGA Object Map to map the Excel template cells to IBM TRIRIGA form fields. See "IBM TRIRIGA object map".
  • Upload the Excel template with the IBM TRIRIGA Object Map into IBM TRIRIGA. The Excel template records for the standard IBM TRIRIGA applications are in the triOfflineContent business object.
  • Use the Populate File workflow task to populate data from IBM TRIRIGA into the Excel sheet. See "Populate file task".
  • Use the Distill File workflow task to distill the Excel data into the IBM TRIRIGA application. See "Distill file task".