Hi,

It's not a bug. The drag and drop area is not enabled when you have the Aurena Agent installed and enabled for the environment you are using.

I will not go into why in much detail but it's partly due to security restrictions in modern web browsers. Simply put, drag and drop can never work "together" with the Aurena Agent, and some users would be confused if they used drag and drop, at the same time assuming the Aurena Agent would do its wonders.

So, we disable the drag and drop feature while the Aurena Agent is enabled.

If you want drag and drop to be enabled, you can disable the IFS Aurena Extension:

1.

 2.

 3.

You can also select a file easily also when the Aurena Agent is enabled, by using the Select File button.

We have got quite a few questions about this and we are thinking of enabling the drag and drop again, even if the Aurena Agent is enabled. The challenge is to make the users/customers understand the limitations that apply when using drag and drop while the Aurena Agent is enabled. We will try to come up with a solution that let's users use both features in a good way, possibly by adding some settings.

Let me know if I answered the question.

thank you Mathias!! I missed that information completely .. but good to know .. maybe explain it to the user as a text info - on the Create Document Form itself?  and agree that it would be nice to have drag and drop, but I would rather have the aurena agent..

anyway thank your clarifying

@Mathias Dahl :

“We have got quite a few questions about this and we are thinking of enabling the drag and drop again, even if the Aurena Agent is enabled. The challenge is to make the users/customers understand the limitations that apply when using drag and drop while the Aurena Agent is enabled. We will try to come up with a solution that let's users use both features in a good way, possibly by adding some settings.”

→ We would realy appreciate having drag&drop even if Aurena Agent is enabled!

Any idea when we can expect a solution?

Kai

Not for 23R1 for sure, we’ll see if there is room in 23R2…

To give us more to work on, can you tell us about some of your use cases and how you use drag and drop as well as the Aurena Agent?

It’s common to hear users say they want drag and drop but they don’t always tell us why drag and drop is better than the standard file picker opened by the Aurena Agent.

Thanks!

Thanks for your response!

I know for example from https://email.t-online.de/  and  https://www.printplanet.de/  that files can be uploaded there using drag & drop in the browser.

We don't have any experience with the Aurena Agent yet, we plan our go live with IFS Cloud in April. From our evaluation of the Aurena Agent we see:

• Files can be deleted from the directory with Drag&Drop. (“real move”)

• The Aurena Agent helps with checking out/checking in documents. One use case is the creation of larger documents that are repeatedly checked out/checked in over several weeks, or when maintaining the same documents in the years that follow.

From the point of view of our key users, it would be very helpful if drag&drop would be also available with Aurena Agent.

Kai

Attached notes for use cases from our key-user in engineering department wa.ochs@polytec.de and some more thoughts:

I understand that dragging „something“ to a browser does not leave a javscript- accessible reference to that „something“ on disk, but only a copy of the contents.

So the solution cannot be receiving the drop event with the browser, but instead receive it with a native windows application. In the moment of dragging over, a window must open on top of the browser (or possibly the dragging area) and snatch the drop event.

The problem for the agent is to know the exact position of the dropping area on screen. The web application knows its coordinates relative to the viewport, but there seems no link between viewport coordinates and MS Windows screen coordinates.

A trick could help: In the very moment of dragging over (dragover event), both, the web application in the browser and the agent could register the mouse cursor position. This establishes the needed link.

Hi, thanks for the comments, and thanks for the attached PDF. It's hard for me to get much out of the latter though, considering it's someone else's handwriting. From the little I can make out of the notes, I don't see that the actual dragging and dropping of a file is important, but the important part is being able to attach files to various places in IFS. If I'm right, that's not the issue here. You can perfectly well select/pick/browse for a file when the Aurena Agent is installed and enabled for your environment. It's just that you right now cannot drag and drop files, you need to select them from the standard Windows file browser/selector/picker.

As mentioned, we hope to be able to find a good and user friendly design that let us enable both at the same time. But! We can never combine the two in the same check-in/upload operation. That means that if a user decides to drag and drop a file, advanced features that require the Aurena Agent (like deleting the local file, as you mention, importing view files/copies and running macros) will not run.

If you need those features you need to use the file picker that the Aurena Agent opens to select the file. This limitation/conflict cannot be overcome, trust me. And our main challenge if we want to enable drag and drop when the Aurena Agent is enable is to make the limitations clear to users or customers.

Do you have any use cases where the act of dragging and dropping a file, instead of picking it from Windows' file browser, is important? I apologize if that's explained in the notes, but as I mentioned I cannot make much out of them.

Thanks!
 

Use case 1 from the PDF above, carried out daily for incoming goods with Apps8:

• Scan a lot of Documents at once to PDF files.
• Open containing folder with many files
• For every single document do:
  • Open in PDF viewer
  • Find invoice number in document
  • Open corresponding order in IFS
  • Drag and drop PDF file to IFS, creating a new document
  • The document gets deleted on hard disk by this

It is helpful if the document gets deleted to be able to see directly what still needs to be done

Thank you for taking on this topic, we will then wait and see which solution will be technically possible.

Thanks, that's much clearer!  

I don't think the file picker will be much less efficient than drag and drop in that work flow if you think a bit about it.

No need for such a manual work flow though. Prepare the files to be imported to contain the invoice number in a predefined place in the file name, then import them all in one go in the Create Documents assistant. Then, install a custom event that will connect the resulting documents to the right order, based on the invoice number (that is now part of the document title). Once the import is finished, delete all the files manually. Very little work for the end user. There's not even a need for the Aurena Agent to pull this off.
 

Dear all,

Would like to mention that this information is very helpful and thank you for it.

May I also ask the reason why the ‘’select file’’ option doesn't work for one of my customers who has enabled the IFS Aurena extension? The button select file, when clicked appears to do nothing. Since drag and drop is also not available, they are not in a position to attach documents via the select file option as well.

Best regards,

Udanee

Is the Aurena Agent enabled for the environment? You can test it under the User Settings screen.

Hi Mathias,

Yes they have enabled it. I was able to sort the issue related to ‘select file’ not working.

Here is the workaround suggested by Amila.

Go to user settings page and then do a small change there, press save, undo the change and press save again. For example, user can toggle the radio buttons in “Preferred Document Type for View and Print” and press save in between.

Best regards,

Udanee

Great, thanks!

Interested in hearing whether feature to drag and drop files was enabled for deployments using Aurena Agent. We are implementing IFS and have experienced users raising concern over the lack of drag and drop feature.

The default dialog that comes up still don't have the drag and drop area enabled if you have the Aurena Agent installed. We aim to look into that and see what can be done, without confusing users, but did not start that work yet.

Do you know about the work around where you can configure the system to take the user to another page, where they can use drag and drop to select the files?

For our learning, do you have any use cases to share with us where we can see how, for your users, drag and drop is better (more efficient, more fun, nicer to look at, faster, more functional, etc.)? Depending on the use case, clicking a button to select a file can be "better" than using drag and drop.
 

Thanks Mathias for such a quick response.

No I’m not aware of the work around. Do you have any details you could share on this? Currently we’re advising users to disable the Chrome Browser Extension, which unfortunately disables all the other features of Aurena Agent.

The use case for our impacted users has been that they have a workflow in which they receive documentation in email attachments from customers and suppliers. These attachments need to be added to IFS. Using drag and drop, they’re able to drag and drop from within the Outlook desktop client straight into IFS. Saving them having to “Save as” the file and then reselect within IFS.

Ah, yes, that's a nice feature, that we didn't even added on purpose Either Outlook or Chrome, or both, "did something" that makes it all work.

That saves a few seconds, for sure, not having to first drag and drop the attachment to some folder (or using Save As), then into IFS.

If it's a show stopper or not I guess depends on how much of that work that you are doing...

As for the workaround, you need to configure this docman default value ATTACH_CREATE_NEW_FORM, and set it to Create Documents (the s is important):

I’m using 23R2 and I see that Drag and Drop has been enabled.  Yay!  

Patrick

It's because the Aurena Agent is not enabled for that environment probably

Alright but I do have Arena enable and it worked so I don’t know why it works now.

 

The problem I have is that even though the system told me that it made the connection, the document is not connected:  

I checked on the object I connected to and on the Objects tab of the document.

Apparently, I’ve got something working that shouldn’t be.  And, I’ve got something that isn’t working right in that the document is not connected to the object from which I created the document (and it doesn’t matter if I use D and D or I search for the file the “normal” way)  It only gives me a connectioin of the use the quick object connection that is the second page of the create new document wizard.

Hi @PIreland ,

The Create Document Assistant does not (yet) use the Aurena Agent and thus had drag and drop enabled.

As for the missing object connection, if you think you have found a bug, please ask your customer to report a case with us.

Btw, did you start the assistant "from an object"?
 

So, I was right, the drag and drop does work when aurena agent is installed? 

Do you think that when using the Create Document Assistant that it should connect the new document to the object from which it was initiated?  I can only get it to connect when I use the Quick Connect objects that are on the second screen of the wizard.

Patrick

@PIreland 

> Do you think that when using the Create Document Assistant that it should connect the new document to the object from which it was initiated? 

It really should. I would be surprised if I look at the code now and it's not made to do this. Things can break though...

Hi all

Try to set this parameter in Edge:

When I change from “On all sites” to “On click” the document attachment shows the “Drag and drop” panel.

We experienced this limitation was introduced when Update 24 was installed in our environments (from Update 20).