Form Model Dependencies and Attachments

Engines Form Engine
1

I can model a Dependent Group which can flag a Group as Not Relevant. What happens if I use this sort of dependency with an Attachment?

I can see a couple of different end-results:

  1. Attachments that have been uploaded to an attachment store and the metadata on the Document will be marked as not relevant.
  2. Only the Attachment metadata on the Document will be marked as not relevant, and the attachment remains (even if no document references it).

The backgorund to this question is that I’m trying to migrate an old Group Clear Dependency that was used on a Attachment Group. The Form Engine migration instructions recommend manually modeling Field Value Dependencies to replicate this behavior. Does this mean that I should model a Field Value Dependency for each of the 8 Attachment metadata fields? Would this even work as I expect or would clearing the metadata without deleting the attachment from the attachment store lead to some other, unexpected, sort of behavior?

2

Hi Malcolm,
the result goes more in the direction of 2.
When using “not relevant” in a group dependency on the attachment group, all fields in the attachment group will be removed, including the attachment_id field which is the important one here. So, it is not necessary to model dependencies for all attachment fields.

Data Services detects, that the attachment id is not in the document anymore and removes the assignment of the attachment in the store to the document.

But the attachment is not immediately deleted in the store. There is some configurable cleanup mechanism, that deals with the unassigned attachments later.

I hope, this answers your question.

Greetings
Conrad

3

Thanks for the explaination.