Category: HotDocs Computations

HotDocs Tips – Importing from Outlook

Working with Outlook

HotDocs has for years had a connector to Microsoft Outlook.  It is an effective tool for importing data.  However, the data that comes in, often needs to be “cleaned up” before it can be used.

  • State Field: The state can sometimes be entered as Abbreviated (e.g. NY) or as a Full State (“New York”) which causes problems on import if you importing into a Multiple Choice field
  • Street Field:  The “Address” in Outlook is different from the BusinessAddressStreet field.  And that field can have multiple lines in it, affecting how that text appears in your template where you may have coded Street1 and Street2

Further, some of the mappings in the tool are confusing because of the terminology used by Outlook and that used by most HotDocs coders can be quite different.

  • Which Address:  In Outlook there is a MailingAddress, a HomeAddress and a BusinessAddress.  If you are importing into a primary address, then you would choose MailingAddress.  If it is a Business, with a Company, you should use Business Address.
  • Salutation, Title and Job Title:  These fields are confusing since Title is “Mr.” or “Mrs”, Saluation is non-existent, and JobTitle is the positon someone holds at a company.

Learn more ...

HotDocs Instruction – QUIT

The HotDocs QUIT instruction specifies that any code in a computation after the QUIT instruction is to be ignored as code. There are two major uses for this instruction.

Firstly, because QUIT stops HotDocs processing a computation as code, it means that you can put it at the top of a computation to stop that computation from being processed.  Very handy if you are halfway through a computation or cannot otherwise make it work.

Secondly, you can use QUIT as a way to add developer comments – simply finish your computation code, enter the QUIT instruction at the bottom, then enter any comments you want after the QUIT command.

The reality is that the QUIT instruction doesn’t really do anything that comments don’t already do. And thanks to HotDocs’ “Comment/Uncomment” block function, its pretty easy to work with large sections of commenting code.

PLAY MACRO

Sometimes, there are things you want done to your assembled document that HotDocs simply cannot do.  Perhaps you want to check margins for a specific section, re-style an inserted template on the fly or automatically run a custom in-house print macro upon completion.  For these sorts of tasks, the PLAY instruction is what you wish to use.  PLAY will tell your word processor to run a specified macro after your document has been created (ie: after the interview, but before it displays as a document).  If there is more than one PLAY instruction in a template, HotDocs will process them in the order encountered.

The syntax for a PLAY instruction is pretty simple:

«PLAY "MyMacro"»

To insert the PLAY instruction, go to the HotDocs button on your HotDocs toolbar, click “Other Field”, then specify PLAY from the drop down box.  You will be asked for the macro name you wish to run.  Click OK.

Notes About PLAY

If you use WordPerfect, your macro can be stored anywhere. If it is outside the default macro location, then your play instruction must have the full file path.

If you use Word, the macro must be stored in the template itself, normal.dot or some other template that is loaded and available at the time you assemble your document.  If you are using Word RTF templates, you may optionally associate a specific template via the Component Manager.

HotDocs Instructions – LIMIT

When it comes to REPEATS in HotDocs, LIMIT is one very handy instruction to know how to use.  As its name suggests, it will LIMIT the number of iterations a repeat can hold, by placing the instruction in the dialog script of the dialog you wish to limit.  Please note that this is entirely different to the number of rows shown on a repeating spreadsheet dialog.  LIMIT will restrict a dialog to have only (for example) 3 iterations, where as the rows shown command will allow a repeat to hold countless iterations, but only show a specified number.

The most basic use of LIMIT is to provide a fixed number, such as:

LIMIT 3

This doesn’t really help you much, unless you are certain your dialog is only ever going to repeat 3 times only.  Here, we can introduce the concept of a user-specified LIMIT.  Lets say we have a dialog named Child DLG that collects some general information about all the kids, as well as a variable named CHLD CNT – asking the user how many children there are.  On Child DLG is a repeating sub-dialog Children RPT – it will repeat once for each child.  In the dialog script of Children RPT, we could have

LIMIT CHLD CNT

This is better – we ask them how many kids, then LIMIT the repeating dialog to that number.  This will stop “empty” repeats in our templates where users have clicked forward and answered a field accidentally.  Great.  Lets make it a bit easier to use.  Instead of CHLD CNT as a number variable, lets use CHLD Num MC as a multiple choice variable, with options from 1 to 20.

LIMIT INTEGER ( CHLD Num MC )

Now, our user can click the number of kids from a list and our LIMIT instruction converts the multiple choice value to a number value.  Simple, straight forward and user friendly.

The above technique can also be used to dynamically show more rows on repeating spreadsheet dialog dynamically

HotDocs Instruction – LANGUAGE

The Language instruction allows you to design, code and assemble templates in HotDocs in a language other than English.  To be able to use this feature, you must first contact a Lexis Nexis sales representative to obtain a DLL for the language you wish to program with.  HotDocs has DLLs for the following languages:

ENG (English), DEU (German), DES (Swiss German), DEA (Austrian German), FRA (French), NLD (Dutch), ESN (Spanish), ITA (Italian)

Using any of the codes above, the instruction you place in your template is as simple as:

LANGUAGE FRA

Also with the Language instruction, it is possible to format the thousands and decimal separators.  The following instruction would use the Italian language, set the thousands separator to a period “.” and the decimal separator to a comma “,”.

LANGUAGE ., ITA

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