Contents

Overview

The ITAM Admin Portal Form Builder has an extensive array of Field Types designed to help you design a form that captures the data your organization needs in the most efficient and effective way possible. To get the most out of the effort put into building forms, it is important to understand the various types of fields, what their purpose is, and what options they provide to fine tune their use.

The Form Builder comes with 25 different field types to assist you in designing a form that will best meet your needs. Some of the fields exist to provide information to the user, either about the form or about the process. Others exist to help manage and control the flow of the form. Many exist to capture and validate a specific type of data and some include the ability to weight the answers to simplify compliance validation.

On this page of the Admin Guide we will cover the various field types and their intended use. On a subsequent page we will discuss the Property Types which are used to configure each field.

Shared Features

Many, and in some cases all, fields share some features in common. Many fields have the same types of properties to configure their use. The different Property Types are described on the Form Field Properties page.

Help Links

Most field options have a help link next to the name of the field to provide information about the field and its intended purpose and use. Simply click on the small icon of a question mark and some information will pop up on the screen about the field.

Help Information Overlay

Data Entry Fields

Data Entry fields are fields intended to capture user data. We have divided these into two different types, Simple and Complex. Simple Data fields are meant to capture small uniform types of information like text or a number. Complex Data fields capture data with more structure like multiple choice or multiple line data.

Simple Data

Single Line Text

This field is a great choice when you have just a single line of text information you want to acquire from the respondent in your form. A single field will accept up to 65,535 characters or about 18 full pages of text.

Paragraph Text

This field is a great choice when you have a paragraph of text information you want to acquire from the respondent in your form. A single field will accept up to 65,535 characters or about 18 full pages of text.

Name

This field is a great choice when you want to collect information about a person’s name and title.

Phone

This field is a great choice when you want to collect telephone number information from your respondent.

Email

This field is a great choice when you want to collect an email address from your respondent. The field does provide some simple syntactic validation.

Time

This field is a great choice when you want to collect time-based information from your respondent.

Date

This field is a great choice when you want to request a date from your respondent.

Number

This field is a great choice when you want to collect or display numbers to your form respondent. You can limit the number of characters typed to be between certain characters or words, or between certain values in the case of a number field. Leave the value blank or 0 if you don't want to set any limits.

Price

This field is a great choice when you want to include currency fields.

Website

This field is a great choice when you want to prepopulate a URL or allow the respondent the opportunity to input a URL. The field does some simple syntactic validation.

Signature

This field is a great choice when you want the respondent to be able to add a signature to the form results.

File Upload

This field is a great choice when you want to allow the form respondent the ability to upload files into ITAM.

Complex Data

Address

This field is a great choice when you want to include the collection of address information.

Checkboxes

This field is a great choice when you want to present a variety of choices in a question format where any or all of the responses may be selected. Question fields allow you to create as simple or as complex a questionnaire field as needed. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it the default selection. Please enter a numeric value in the field adjacent to the response that may be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of your choice.

Multiple Choice

This field is a great choice when you want to present a variety of choices in a question format where only one of the responses may be selected. Question fields allow you to create as simple or as complex a questionnaire field as needed. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it the default selection. Please enter a numeric value in the field adjacent to the response that may be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of your choice.

Matrix Choice

This field is a great choice when you want to present a variety of choices in a question matrix format where only one of the responses may be selected. Question fields allow you to create as simple or as complex a questionnaire field as needed. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it the default selection. Please enter a numeric value in the field adjacent to the response that may be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of your choice.

Dropdown

This field is a great choice when you want to present a variety of choices in a question with a drop-down style format where only one of the responses may be selected. Question fields allow you to create as simple or as complex a questionnaire field as needed. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it the default selection. Please enter a numeric value in the field adjacent to the response that may be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of your choice.

Record ID

The Record ID field allows you to create an automatic Record ID associated with an entry.

Information Fields

Syndication

This field is a great choice when you want to display formatted messages such as RSS feed information within your form displayed to the respondent. It's a great way to display advertisements or other important information as many times within a form that you require.

Media Player

This field is a great choice when you want to present a variety of media selections such as MP4 videos, external URL-based links to video content, MP3 audio content, and image files such as PNG, JPG, and GIF files. Display attributes are automatically scaled to the form's width but a pop-up window feature allows for full screen viewing too. Display training content, advertisements, instructional, and informational content, or anything relevant to your current module's form content for a rich multimedia experience.

Form Control Fields

One of the key elements of form design is organization of the fields into a logical flow for the user. One common way to do that is to separate similar data into sections or pages to provide a visual grouping as well as help the user avoid being overwhelmed by a large page of data fields. These Form Control Fields allow the flow of a form to be broken up in different ways.

Control Group

A Control Group is a container for other fields. Fields placed in a Control Group are treated as a unit when it comes to some tracking and reporting features of ITAM. This is best used when multiple fields are used to capture the data meant to represent a single control. For more information about Control Groups see the Control Group section of this guide.

Section Break

A Section Break is a great choice when you want to divide your form up into sections that appear all on the same page. Options to include preformatted text is present. A popular use of this field is for narratives and informational sections in a form making it more descriptive and meaningful to your respondents.

Page Break

The Page Break field adds a page break to the form separating the fields which follow it onto a separate page from the fields which proceed it.

Cascade Form

In addition to separating data into groups, sections or pages, you can also separate data into multiple connected forms. This field is a great choice when you want to connect multiple forms creating a contiguous experience for your respondents. If you want to simplify complex forms with common templates that you "stitch" or link together, this is a powerful innovation that allows you to do that.

When you place this field into position anywhere in your main form you are presented with a multiple-choice drop-down selector containing all the active forms in your current inventory. You can cascade multiple separate forms together. You are also able to cascade within a cascaded form creating complex form nesting scenarios. The form fields will assume the name of the cascaded form name present in the drop down form selector.

The results of the respondent entries will stay with the specific forms cascaded together quite elegantly.

Any form that is connected by a cascade field will independently update data when a user enters information and in addition to the separate form data set, the updates flow upwards to the top-level cascade form data set. Bi-directional data management is possible with the top-level collation of all separate form data into one unified experience and report output.

In this section we covered the high-level aspects of each field type. In the next section we’ll talk about the various properties which can be set on a field to configure them in the way you need.

[Previous Topic → Form Builder] Navigation Placeholder [Next Topic → Form Field Properties]

Administration Guide

Overview
Form Manager
Advanced Form Management
Form Notifications
Form Logic
Form Integration
Automapping
Form Builder
Form Fields
Form Field Properties
Entry Manager
Form Status Indicators
Managing POA&M Reports
File Manager
Report Manager
Report Types
Theme Manager
User Manager
Template Manager
Additional Configuration Options
System Settings
My Profile
Hidden Functionality