Submit Forms
Account users cannot manually modify application data at will, but they can submit information to the system using forms. As discussed on the Forms page, a form acts as a profile for a set of information the user can submit to the system, and routines can be set to execute on the submission of a form with the guarantee of what fields the user can submit, as well as the format of those fields. Forms are primarily accessible to users at runtime from the main menu. A menu link to a form redirects the user to the Submit page for that form, an example of which is shown in the screenshot below:
Every field defined in the form that is not marked as "Hidden" appears on this page, with the required fields marked with an asterisk. The "Submit" buttons in the corners of the page pass the information the user has entered to the routines engine for processing; these buttons are not always labeled "Submit", however, as the designer of a form can enter a value for the form's "Submit Label" field to override the default text of these buttons. The "Clear" buttons, which erase the information the user has entered into the fields of the form, do not have configurable labels.
For users in design mode, the menus of the account revert to the system defaults, and individual forms no longer appear on the main menu. Instead, all forms are accessible on the View > Forms page. Here, all forms to which the user has access appear on a list on the left filter, and the page itself is titled "Submit Form" as opposed to the name of any individual form. If the user has the permissions necessary to design forms, a "Configure Form" button appears below the list of forms, which redirects the user to the Configure Forms page for the selected form. Similarly, if the user has sufficient permissions, an "Edit as XML" button also appears, which allows an admin user to edit the underlying XML definition of the selected form without having to leave the page.
This topic contains three sub-sections which will elaborate on the appearance and functionality of forms at runtime.
- The Data Type Visualization page will describe the appearance of fields of each data type on a form at runtime, as well as how the user must input data to each.
- The Form Results section will explain the different messages that the Submit Form page can return in response to the user attempting to submit a form.
- The Printable Receipts section will discuss the PDF receipt of form submission generated by the system.