Using lookups from external sources

Last published at: June 30th, 2021

Data can be looked up in real-time from other systems using database connections or web-service connections.  To configure lookups, you must first define your connections.  Let’s navigate to the FlowWright “Connections -> Database” page:

Database connections page will render as follows:

Click the “Create” button to create a new database connection.  Create dialog renders as follows:

Enter the name of the connection, type, and connection string. You can also test the connection string right from the dialog before creating the connection.  

Click the “Create” button to create the connection.  Once the connection is created, it will render as follows:

Let’s navigate to the form definitions and open the “TestFormFile” within the form designer.  Drag the lookup control to the designer and double click on the “Lookup” button to configure its properties.

Select the connection type as “Database”, enter the SQL query on the “Select Query” box.   

Scroll down on the dialog and map the database fields to the form fields. Let’s save the form and navigate to the form instances tab. Select the form Instance created from before and click the “Edit” button to edit the form.  

The form instance should render as follows:

Click the “Name Lookup” button for the lookup dialog:

Select a row from the lookup dialog box and click the “OK” button.  Based on the selected row, the value “Admin User” is entered within the “First Name” field.

Let’s look at one simple example of a form definition using form widgets.  Create a form definition with some form widgets like “FirstName”,” Phone Number”, “Submit” and “Close” button as shown below”:


Save the definition and create a form instance for the form definition. Click on the submit button to save and submit the details.