How shared guides work

Guides can be shared by multiple forms. You define a shared guide like you define a guide for an individual form, except that you attach the guide to multiple forms. If you do not want the guide to be shared, select only one form. Also, share any active links in the shared guide that you want to execute on multiple forms. If a guide contains active links that do not belong to or are not shared with the current form, those active links are skipped when the guide is executed.

Changes you make to shared active links affect all guides and forms that use them. For more information about creating shared workflow, see Shared-workflow. 

Related topic

Defining-guides-and-guide-actions

The sequence of active links in the guide takes precedence over any execution condition previously defined for the active links. You can redirect the active links by using the Go to Guide Label action. If you are creating active links that are used only in a guide, do not include an Execute On condition in them. Both the condition and its execution order are ignored when the guide's active links are executed.

Guides use the following procedures when determining which form to run on:

  1. Search for the current form.
  2. If the current form belongs to the guide, run the guide against that form.
  3. If the current form does not belong to the guide, open a new window with a reference form and run the guide.
    Because a guide can be shared by one or more forms, it also can contain multiple active links from those forms. All active links associated with the selected forms appear in the list when you add an active link to the guide. (See Defining-Exit-Guide-active-link-or-filter-actions for more information.) As a result, you can access those active links only from the forms listed in the Form Name field. Active links that are not associated with a form that is associated with the guide do not execute.

    If you select multiple forms, the guide is attached to all of them. The first form you select becomes the primary form. You can change the primary form by using the drop-down list.

Shared guide use cases

The following use cases illustrate shared guide behavior. Assume you have created guide X and shared it with forms A, B, and C.

Example 1

  1. Create a Call Guide active link action for forms A, B, and C.
  2. Open form A and execute the Call Guide action.
    Guide X is executed on form A.

Example 2

  1. Create a Call Guide active link action for forms A, B, and C.
  2. Open form C and execute the Call Guide action.
    Guide X is executed on form C.

Example 3

  1. Designate Form B as the reference form.
  2. Create a Call Guide active link action for forms A, B, C, and D.
  3. Open form D and execute the Call Guide action.
    A new window opens with the reference form B.
    Guide X is executed on form B in a new window.

Example 4

  1. Form A is designated as the reference form.
  2. Open guide X from the Open dialog box.
    Guide X is executed on form A, the reference form.

 

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