Create a Form Calculator


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We are putting together a proof of concept to purchase Nintex worklfow/forms.  I've done a lot of work with workflows, but have done very little with forms. 

 

What I'd like to do is replace a custom webpart I've created with a form if possible.  Basically, a user enters Ticker and Portoflio as lookups.  The form would then display shares_held, close_price and market_value.  All these items are in a list. 

 

An input box will be provided so that the user can enter Basis Points(BPS).  A calculation using BPS, price, market value and shares outputs the shares required to achieve the desired BPS change.

 

So my question would be how to get the list items to post back to the form (showing the ticker & portfolio results) and then provide a calculation result (shares required based on BPS) on a second post back.

 

Is this possbile?  If so how complex? Any ideas would be appreciated.


2 replies

Badge +17

Joseph,

Here are some things to consider:

  1. You mentioned that the user should enter the "Ticker and Portfolio" into a form.  This can be done via a text box within Nintex Forms.
  2. The values entered should be used as queries to pull back information from an existing list.  This can be done currently with Nintex Forms and you can use a List item view to filter and return values based upon the information entered.
  3. You can separate the list view into a different panel and have it show/hide based on if the input values have been entered or not (this was an extra thing I added for you wink.png)

For your other part dealing with the BPS...

  1. If you are wanting the user to enter the BPS and perform calculations, then you would need formulas to handle that and you can utilize the calculation control within Nintex to run that.  One issue here is that if you are using values entered in the form to return back information, you would need to take that into consideration as part of your formula.  Essentially performing calculations with variables may or may not work, just depends on how you have it written.  The other issue I see here is that if you are using values from the list, those values don't actually exist on the form itself so that would/may be difficult to compute.

At the moment, I don't know how you would go about grabbing the information from the lookup and pushing that back into the formula, so I would say you could do the following:

Have the list lookup at the top of the form.  That would allow users to select a Ticker and Portfolio.  The information, shares, price, etc would then show up underneath the lookup.  I would then create a calculator section underneath that which would allow them to basically input the values necessary to compute.  They would input the BPS, and based on the values being displayed above, they could input the price, shares, and whatever else.  Use the calculated control to run the computation based on the values entered and give them a result.  The computation should be done at runtime so that if they decide they don't like any of the values, they can change any of them to yield a different result.  This then would act as a true form calculation that doesn't save anything but allows them to see data and manipulate it. 

I know this isn't as pretty as the automated, pull in values and compute them, but it works, I've done it plenty of times before and with the Nintex Forms web part you could then place the form on a page and the user interacts with it in real time.  You could also add buttons that would clear out the inputs of the calculations or refreshes the Ticker query as well.  Not a lot to do this, and if you have some working knowledge of SharePoint, forms and formulas, you should be able to wire this up in a few hours max.

Hope that helps....

Badge +2

Thank you Eric.  I'll give that shot and see how it looks.  I was hoping for a way to pull the values from the list view....being new to this I was hoping there was something I was overlooking. 

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