I was hoping to get a sense of whether or not I'm headed in the right direction with a request that I recently received from some under user teams for our M-Files Desktop Environments. We primarily work with Health Care data so one of our main Parent Objects is a Patient/Member, with Document's being a child of the Patient. During the enrollment process for our Patients there are several assessments and State/Federal forms and applications that need to be completed. Sometimes they need to be completed more than once and even yet some of the forms/applications need to be completed annually. Our enrollment team recently requested that the Start and End/Expiration dates of these documents be displayed directly on the Patient object. My initial thought was that this would be easy enough to develop as a VAF module, with a Configuration Editor to control which documents and their dates should populate into the associated Patient's fields after the Create and Checkin events. (e.g., Document Class A is associated with Properties X and Y on the Patient, Document Class B is associated Property Z on the Patient, etc.)
What I was hoping to get some input or insight on is whether I'm over engineering this and there is some out of the box functionality that already exists within M-Files Desktop? The data model that I've inherited and is very flat. An ongoing project for myself and my team is making it more relational and moving a lot of the Patient properties into separate objects with associated workflows. I think this could solve some of the use cases they presented, but some of their processes have enough variability that I still see some use in just being able to set parameters for something like Source Class, Source Key Field, Source Property, Target Property, and then some additional fields to dictate behavior (e.g., Always update the Parent value is New date is greater than Current date value, always update date value, etc.) and just have this always run regardless of any object of workflow state.
