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Form Setting Properties

 

Each form setting property is described below.

On this page:

Form Name

This is the name you see on the Forms home page where your forms are listed.  We recommend changing the name to make it more meaningful than the arbitrary name assigned when you create it, but keep in mind it is a working name only, so users will not see it. Form names longer than 60 characters will be truncated. It is recommended that you name your form/flows using characters that are suitable for filenames. Following the POSIX filename standard (A–Z a–z 0–9 . _ - ) will ensure it works.

Description

By default all form descriptions say, “Edit the form to change this description,” but you can change this if you wish.  The description appears as a tooltip when you mouse over the area just to the right of the form’s share icon on Forms home page.  You also see this description when you view individual submission documents.

Element Name

The default value for the Element Name property is form. The root element name in the submission xml of a form created from the designer palette is determined by the value in this field. It needs to be a valid XML element name. The designer can now change the name of the form without impacting the element name.  Form schema and the generated xml file show the element name. When the form name is updated, and 'Element Name' is kept the same, previous submissions can be initialized successfully.  When 'Element Name' is updated, previous submissions cannot be initialized.

If you change the element name, all existing submissions will become invalid and you will see the error message. "Submission is not valid. An incompatible change was made to the form/flow."

Visibility

The visibility field has been removed from the form/flow property pane in the  designers. Form Visibility is selected via the Access Control List wizard. You can access the wizard by clicking on the  icon on the Forms Home Page or the Flows Home Page  for your form/flow. If you are in the form/flow designers, click the  icon in the toolbar to display the wizard.

The choices for form visibility are:

  • Private  - only the owner can edit, test or use the form. The owner must log in to .
  • Public In Tenant - the form is usable to anyone who has an account (username/password) and is logged in to your tenant.
  • Public -  anyone can use it even if they are not logged in. 
  • Custom - the designer may configure runtime access to a form for selected users and/or roles (i.e. users with these roles). Roles and users can be selected via an editable combo-box control. Custom is not supported for flows because roles and users are assigned to the steps in a flow to indicate who has permission to perform that step. The owning designer always has access to the form/flow.

Note that irrespective of the Visibility setting only the owner can edit or remove the form/flow. 

Task Info

When you save a partially filled form to continue it later, the saved form is accessed via your task list. This field controls the name that gets displayed in the task list. For more details, see the Tasks documentation.  This field can use templatized strings for dynamic content, e.g. the Task Info can contain "Vacation Request for {FirstName} {LastName}" where FirstName and LastName are the names of fields in a form. Before putting the task on your task list, will resolve the Task Info string using the actual values of the FirstName and LastName fields e.g. "Vacation Request for Tom Smith".

You access your Task list from your applications home page. You use the Task list to perform tasks, complete a saved form or work flow, to view a task's history, or search for tasks you've participated in — a tenant admin can also search for other users' tasks.

Tracking Id

When your form loads it will send a page view event to your Google Analytics account if you enter your Google account tracking ID into this form property. Please refer to the Google documentation for finding your Google Analytics tracking ID.

Tracking Url

This property works in conjunction with the Tracking ID and was intended to make it easier to read the long URL's when trying to determine which form/flow is being tracked using Gloogle Analytics. Full functionality will be available in a future release. Please contact Customer Support for the latest information on this feature. Tracking Url is not available for flows at this time.

Deployment

This field lets you toggle a form between two states: PRODUCTION and DEVELOPMENT. When a form is in the development state it contains a watermark. Deploying the form into the production state removes the watermark.

You can change the state of your form from the deployment dropdown or you can click on the deployed/undeployed button on the forms home page.

See the deployment state topic in the Administrator's Guide.   

Geo Location

You can capture the location where your form was filled in by turning on ' Geo location feature. A forms knows it's current location and will submit that information when the form is completed.   uses the HTML5 GeoLocation api.  The geo api is well supported on tablet, phone and recent laptop/desktop browser versions. This feature works on a desktop or any GPS capable mobile device.

When the form loads in the browser, it will ask for the location. All browsers will show a pop up asking the user's permission to use their location, unless permission was Always granted or refused in a previous session. The user must give permission for Geo location to proceed. Here is an example of the request in the Firefox browser:

The Geo Location feature works in conjunction with rules that use the form.positionUpdated identifier. You can set up the rule to execute every time the position is updated. See Business Rules for examples of rules that will do this. Also see Rules Position Data for the complete list of available build-in data.

You can also collect additional information associated with your location. For example, a section of a Police Incident Report, shown in the image, captures the location where the form was filled in plus the address information associated with it. The last position update will be in the submission metadata of your form or flow but it is NOT automatically added to the XML document .  You must create controls (perhaps hidden) and rules to add the location information to the form XML document.  The Position Address section of the Police Incident Report has controls and rules to show longitude, latitude, accuracy and/or errors plus the address information.

Latitude and Longitude display the coordinates of the user location. The accuracy of the location in meters is represented by the value in the Accuracy field - a low Accuracy value means the position is more precise. You can display a position error code and the text description of error message in your form if desired. Error message codes can be 1, 2 or 3:

1 - Permission Denied - You will get this error code if the user says no to the access question.

2 - Position Unavailable - This error code means the device running the browser cannot get the GPS satellite signal (tunnel, underground).

3 - Timeout - The device running the browser times out trying to get the location information.

You will never see coordinates and error codes in the same form. You get one or the other.

Click on the Toolbar in the Forms Designer to display the Form Properties panel. Select one of three options from the Geo Location dropdown to turn this feature on:

  • None - (no location) - this is the default
  • On Load - at start time
  • Custom - allows the designer to specify a periodic refresh. The default value is 30 seconds. Choosing this method will fire a rule in the specified time. For example, if the field to the right of the Geo Location Dropdown was set to 10, the rule would fire every 10 seconds. See below for more details.

 

You can also turn on/off/modify the feature by clicking on a form activity in a flow which will display the form Properties panel. The Loc Timeout is the amount of time in seconds the location finder in the browser will search to find the location before it times out. The default value is 5 seconds. To capture additional information based on the location via a Business Rule or to embed a Google map in your form. you need a connection to google.com and you must check the Detailed Loc. checkbox on the Properties panel. You will need to put a message control in your form where you want the map to display. Type f-map-div in the css class field on the message control Properties panel. This is a built in java script that cannot be edited to display the map.

The map will only display in use mode. 


Setup Key/Saved Fields

This setting controls which fields are saved to the built-in submissions repository. By default, all your data is saved as an XML document. This is the most efficient way to store/access your data both in terms of speed as well as storage. However, if you prefer to view your data via the submissions user interface, you can choose which fields are saved in addition to the XML data.

Considerations when deciding which types of fields to configure are listed below.

  • Key fields are indexed for easy search of Submissions. You will see the controls designated as Key fields in the Submissions table. This is helpful when trying to locate a particular submission from a long list. Key fields do not affect performance. They are not downloaded when exporting your submissions to Excel.
  • Saved fields do affect performance as they are independently stored in addition to XML data. This can significantly reduce performance, especially for large forms and require additional storage in the repository. Saved fields are not rendered in the submission table and cannot be used as search criteria for submissions. Saved fields  are downloaded to Excel.

Clicking on the Click to setup Key/Saved Fields link displays the setup wizard. This link is on the form's properties as shown below. If you have navigated away from the form's properties and instead see a control properties panel, just click anywhere on the toolbar to return to the form's properties.

The wizard displays the fields from your form. Only controls that are considered form data will be listed. For Example, the link, signature, image, upload, trigger, section, PageBreak, Message, Form Viewer and video controls will not show up in the saved or key field lists as there is no value to save or query against. Also, group controls (tabs, panels, repeats) will not show up on the list of Available Fields.

We do not recommend using fields from Tables and Repeats as your key field. The data will be hard to interpret since there can be multiple data values for the same field.

Saved Fields

You may select the fields you want saved separately in addition to the XML on the Setup Key/Saved Field screen. You can also change the order of the fields when you move them into the Saved Fields area. The order of the form fields will be reflected in the column order if you choose to export submissions to Excel.

There are two ways to select/unselect or reorder saved fields :

  • Drag and Drop - You can drag the fields from the Available Fields list and drop them into the Saved Fields lists if you re using Firefox, Chrome or Safari browsers. Items may be dragged between lists and within the saved fields list. Items may be dropped between existing items and before the top-most item and below the bottom item. Only a single item may be dragged. You can change the order of the Available Fields list if you are using Chrome or Safari bowsers. Currently, the drag and drop function will not work in the Internet Explorer browsers. This issue will be addressed in a future release.

  • Center arrow buttons - IE 8/9 users must use the arrow buttons to move selected fields between the Available or Saved Fields lists or to reorder them by moving back and forth as necessary. The arrow buttons always add items to the bottom of the list. 
    • The > right arrow moves the selected field from the Available Fields list to the bottom of the Saved Fields list.
    • The < left arrow moves the selected field from the Saved Fields list to the bottom of the Available Fields list.
    • The >> double right arrows move all the form fields in the Available Fields list to the Saved Fields list.
    • The << double left arrow moves all the form fields in the Saved Fields list to the Available Fields list.

The image below shows a selected field in the available list ready to be moved to the saved list via drag and drop or arrows. Click Finish to save the changes. Selecting the X in the upper right corner cancels any changes. Remember to save your changes when you exit out of the designer. Saved Fields are stored in the database when the form/flow is completed. The fields you select will be displayed in the Submission Detail for each submission. You can also search the submissions repository for these fields using the  API.

Controls are listed in the Available and Saved Lists using control labels. If you change the label of a control in your form that was previously added to the Saved Fields list the control will remain in the Saved List reflecting the new label. In a flow, the label can be different for controls with the same name in different activities. Controls are listed using the control name. If the name changes, it will unset the saved field. The newly renamed control will now show on the Available list and the designer must move it to the Saved List again.

Let's say you set up the Saved Fields in a Product Order Form as shown below:

When you click the Excel icon to export the submissions data to an Excel Spreadsheet, you will be given the option to open or save the file. The file will be named using the range of dates of the Submission data, if you choose to save it to disk . For Example, you might have submission data from February 15th to March 15th of the year 2013 that you want to export. The file name would be something like Submissions%28021513-031513%29(1).xls. Opening the file will show the tenant and application name, the date range of the submission data and the number of submissions. The portion of the Excel Spreadsheet shown in the image is an example of a modified output file.

Perhaps, as the form designer, you decide that the Phone column should be between the Color and the Email Address columns.You can change the order of the columns using the arrows or drag and drop to this:

Exporting the submission results to Excel will arrange the columns in the spreadsheet as shown:

When you first open the Excel spreadsheet, the submissions meta data (Started Date, Updated Date, State, Age/Duration, Lock User, Lock Date, Revision, Status, Submitted By and Submitted IP) makes up the first 11 columns. You cannot reorder the meta data columns.

Fields saved as part of a submission are always included in the export. For example, suppose several submissions of the Product Order Form were created with the Saved Fields list shown in the image:

The designer then removes the Phone field from the Saved Fields list. Exporting the previous created submissions after the change, will order the saved fields by the new list. Previously saved fields which are present in the submission but not in the current list are added on as the right-most columns of the spreadsheet.

Key Fields 

Click the Key Fields tab. Up to five key fields may be efficiently stored along with the form submission. Key fields do not significantly reduce performance nor do they consume significant additional storage in the repository. It is also very efficient to search the submissions repository using these key fields. Key fields are also directly displayed in the Submissions Table so you can easily view them in a tabular view.

Multiple Controls with Same Name

It is possible that your form contains two or more controls with the same name nested inside different sections. For example if your form has a section control named Parent containing a text control called Name and has another section control named Child also containing a text control called Name, the Key/Saved Fields wizard will display two entries called "Name". In order to to know which is which, simply hover your mouse over each entry in the list for Saved Fields or dropdown for Key Fields and you will see the path to the control. In the example below you see Parent > Child > Name.

The same name fields will be categorized in the data tab of the form submission like this:

Printable

If you check a form's printable checkbox a print icon will be displayed at the top of your form. If you don’t want users to print your form, uncheck the checkbox so users will not see the print icon. You can control which form fields are visible in the pdf print view via the printable property on each field in your form. Refer to Printing Forms for more information about Print View/submission pdfs, including how to support international characters.

Save

This property is checked by default. When check all submissions for this form will be stored in ' submission repository. If you uncheck the checkbox, the form submission will still be logged in the submission repository and you will be able to view the metadata about the submission (time/date submitted, success/failure conditions, etc...) but NO form field data is saved.

The submissions repository can store your form data in three ways -- as data values; as an xml document; and as a pdf form image. By default for efficiency, data is only stored as xml. If you plan to export your form data to an Excel spreadsheet or plan to view your form data in the submission repository detail view, you must configure your form to save the data field values. See the documentation for setting up key/saved fields. Also see the documentation for viewing your data in submission repository.

Save PDF

This property can only be checked if you have the save property checked. When checked a PDF image of the file is also saved in Live Forms' submission repository or to Google drive. See the documentation for the submissions repository for details on viewing the PDFs saved there. Notice all controls, including those disabled or in a signed section, are no longer grayed out in the pdf.

PDF Name

When you check Save PDF on the form Property panel, an optional PDF name field displays. It is only visible when the "Save PDF" property is checked and is disabled when the "Save" property is unchecked. If this new property is set, then it is used to name the generated PDF. You can use templates to name the pdfs .For example, let's say you have an Employee Onboarding form for new hires and you wanted the pdf in the submissions to be named using their last name. Simply add the name of the control in your form that collects the last name as a template ex:{LastName} in the PDF Name property. The pdf for each Employee Onboarding submission will then be named {LastName}.pdf.

If the PDF Name property is empty, then the form name is used as the pdf name. It is recommended that PDF Names use characters that are suitable for filenames. Following the POSIX filename standard (A–Z a–z 0–9 . _ - ) will ensure it works.

Avoid special characters when specifying the PDF Name. If you are using a template where users enter characters for the PDF Name, you will need to write a rule to handle the special characters by escaping them.For example, entering Cable & Wireless into a field in your form that is being used as a template for the PDF name requires a rule to escape the & (and any other special characters) from the control.



In the submissions, the pdf for the Onboarding of new hire Eric Armani is named as shown.


Setting Margins, Headers and Footers for the PDF

The designer can specify the content of the headers, footers and the size of margins for the pdf in a form/flow. Refer to this documentation for the details.

Show Logo

This property is checked by default and causes the “powered by ” logo to appear on your form. Uncheck the checkbox to remove the logo from your form.

Captcha

This feature helps to protect your forms against spamming by automatic submitters. By selecting captcha, an image is displayed when a user submits your form, containing a string and also an audio recording. The user must enter the string into the specified input box. If the string is correctly reproduced, the form submission will be processed as usual. If it is not a new string is displayed and the user may try again. Click the  to cancel.

Save/Load

If you check this checkbox, a Save button will be displayed at the bottom of your form.

This feature is useful for lengthy forms where your users may not have all the information required to complete the form in a single session. By clicking on the Save button a copy of the form with all the current values is saved on the  form server. Later the user can re-open the form from their task list; see Perform a task for more information. The form will populate the fields with the saved values.

You can save your partially filled in forms as many times as you want.

Currently the Save button label for forms cannot be customized like it can for flows. The ability to change this may be available in a future release.

See the Save and Load feature, for full details.

Show in History

If this checkbox is unchecked, tasks for the form or flow will not appear in Tasks history searches. If you want them to appear, make sure this box is checked. Checking or Un-checking it affects all tasks including ones that were created prior to the action.

Force Auth

If this is checked and the  tenant supports SSO (single sign on) such as the LDAP Security Manager enabled tenants, then the  authentication mechanism will be in effect even when a user is already authenticated via SSO.

For example, if you leave force auth unchecked and your form is public in tenant, and you are already authenticated via SSO you will not have to login directly to  to use the form.  If instead you check force auth  will force you to login directly even though you are already authenticated via SSO.

See Working with LDAP and Single Sign On for more details.

This property is currently ineffective for tenants with the default delegating security manager. However the delegating security manager may support SSO in the future.

Accessible

Live Forms can be used to build accessible forms/flows that meet Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards. Check the Accessible property to turn on this feature. Refer to this documentation for the details.

Decorated

Decorated is checked by default when you create a new form. If  you uncheck Decorated at the form level, newly added controls will have their control level decorator property unset -- meaning no decorator. It will NOT remove the decorator from all controls already in the form. The decorated property can also be set at the flow level. The designer can select a decorator for each of the steps in a flow that will display on the navigation bar.