Form Fields
- Christopher Rushing (Unlicensed)
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
The Single Line Text field is meant to gather simple text information which can be entered and displayed on a single line.
Paragraph Text
This field is meant to capture more than a single line of text information from the respondent in your form. A single field will accept up to 65,535 characters or about 18 full pages of text, but can be limited to a set number of characters or words. It can also be set to accept Rich Text which allows for more formatting options.
Name
The Name field gives you a way to quickly captures the aspect of a name without creating individual fields for the different parts. There are 4 formats to choose from:
Name Format | Format Description |
|---|---|
Normal | Simply displays options for the First and Last names |
Normal + Title | Displays options for the Title, First and Last names, and Suffix |
Full | Display options for the First, Middle, and Last names |
Full + Title | Displays options for the Title, First, Middle, and Last names, and Suffix |
The format may only be changed when first adding to the form. Once the form is saved with the field it will lock the chosen format in place.
Phone
The Phone field is designed to collect telephone number information easily in your form. It provides for both US and International format options and even allow you to set default values for any or all sections if most respondents phone numbers will tend to share aspects, like an area code.
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 simplifies the collection of time-based information. It can be configured with an option to include seconds and also it can be switched to 24 hr time.
Date
The Date field allows for capturing date information on a form. There are two options, US (MM/DD/YYYY) and International (DD/MM/YYYY). The field also include a date-picker, allowing a date to be chosen from a calendar instead of entered manually.
Number
This field is a great choice when you want to collect or display numbers to your form respondent. You can limit the values to be between certain values or number of digits. Leave the value blank or 0 if you don't want to set any limits.
Price
The Price field is designed to facilitate entering currency information and can be configured to accept the format for many different types of currency.
Website
This field allows the respondent to input a URL and does some simple syntactic validation to make sure it meets some basic format requirements.
Signature
This field adds a signature option to a form.
File Upload
This Upload field grants the ability to upload files into ITAM and associate them with the form. Users will have the option of using a modified version of the File Manager when uploading files. Files uploaded to the field will be listed with a link to the file. For known file types ITAM will try to display or play the file if appropriate. An option to download the files will be provided.
Complex Data
Address
The Address field simplifies the collection of address information. It automatically provides fields for the various parts of an address and can be configured to allow for US only, providing a dropdown of states, or international, allowing the State/Province/Region information to be entered manually.
Checkboxes
The Checkboxes field allows you to present a variety of options where any or all of the responses may be selected. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it selected by default. Each choice requires 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
The Multiple Choice field allows a form to present a variety of choice options where only one of the responses may be selected. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Click on the choice to make it the default selection. The numeric value associated with the field adjacent to the response that may be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of your choice.
Matrix Choice
The Matrix Choice field allows you to create multiple question within one field, each with the same possible set of answers and scores. Each row represents a question to present to users with an optional Template ID. The questions can be as simple or as complex as needed. Use the plus and minus buttons to add and delete choices. Each column represents a possible answer to each question, similar to a survey where you rate your response to each question. You also need to assign a Score that will be used for risk-weighting or other analytical calculations of each choice. There is also an option to bulk insert Rows and Columns.
Dropdown
The Dropdown field is similar to the Multiple Choice field type in that it presents a variety of choices where only one of the responses may be selected, however, it does so by using a dropdown to select and display the choice rather than radio buttons. 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. It is displayed as an auto-generated number with an optional prefix which can be set via the Record Prefix property. The field is not updateable by the user. Including an appropriate Field Label and Guidelines For User information will keep this field from confusing your users.
Information Fields
Information Fields display information to the form user rather than gather information.
Syndication
The Syndication field allows for the display of formatted messages such as RSS feed information within your form. It's a great way to display advertisements or other important information as many times within a form that you require. Since it is fed from an external URL, it can include updated information without needing to modify the form.
Media Player
The Media Player field allows for displaying and playing media information, 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
Section Breaks 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.
There is no limit to how many pages you may have in a form as long as they are not blank pages.
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.
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