Adding Forms

Basic Form creation

If the form product has been enabled on your site, "form folder" should appear as one of the choices in the “add to folder” drop-down menu.

If you make a form folder, this will create a basic form with minimal elements in it. You can then add additional elements like text fields and checkboxes later. The default fields created (which can be deleted if you don't need them) are boxes that ask for “your email address”, “subject”, and “comments”. All three are set to be required of the user. The email address field checks to see if the address is valid, and the others check to see if the field is blank. For an example of what this looks like, see our default form.

When you create a form folder there are three sections you can edit, called “default”, “decoration” and “overrides”.

1. Default lets you choose a title, description, name for the submit button, and gives you the option of having a reset button, using “mailer” to send the form and whether or not to redirect to a “thanks” page.
2. The decoration section lets you put a prologue and an epilogue on your form.
3. The Overrides section gives a number of options that will probably only apply to programmers. One such option is to create a “custom success action” so that the form redirects to a different page than the thanks page. An example would be to write “redirect_to:string:outreach”. That would send the viewer to the “outreach” page upon success (the form sending as it should), instead of the “thanks” page. Overrides exist for many item types, and they should almost never be touched except by a School of Medicine programmer.

If you look at a created form in the folder view, you can see the items that are created within it (the same way a folder would have pages and images, etc. within it). By default these items are: Mailer, Your E-mail Address, Subject, Comments, and Thank You. If you add "Save Data Adapter" to the folder, the option appears to have form results saved to a singular file which can be downloaded later at any time. You can then use this folder view to change these items to affect their order, delete them, etc.

Item Types 

• Boolean- This is another name for a checkbox. By default this gives a 1 or 0 as an answer like “checked” or “unchecked”, but you can make this whatever you want (eg: true, false).
• Custom script adapter- Avoid! Only for School of Medicine programmers.
• Date/Time- This item type works as expected, by giving a series of dropdowns that give the date in this format: “Year-Month-Day-Hour-Minute-AM/PM.”
• Email- This item type is given by default, and catches the user’s system email address by default. Really it’s just a string field with a validator to make sure the input is a valid email address. This field automatically fills in the email address of the person filling out the form if they are logged into the system.
• Fieldset folder- This item type is like a folder within the form, it can hold it’s own elements like checkboxes, etc. It draws a little box around them so you can organize fields into groups. You create it like a subfolder of the main form folder and then place the other item types inside of it.
• File- This item type allows you to upload files that will be sent to the form creator as an email attachment. It works like many other file uploaders, allowing the user to search their computer for the file to upload.
• Fixed point field- This item type allows you to specify that the user should add a decimal number here within a certain range. (eg: 98.6)
• Image- This item type allows you to add an image to the folder that can later be added to a thank you page or to one of the rich text sections such as the prologue, epilogue, etc.
• Integer- This item type is like Fixed point, but allows for an integer instead of a decimal field.
• Label field- This item type just allows a space for some text, with no inputs. It is useful for putting text on your form to label a section.
• Lines field- This item type is just like a textbox, but allows you to specify a required number of lines.
• Mailer adapter- This item type allows you to change who you send the message to, and add extra info to the message like some text before, after and as a signature.
• Multiselect- This item type gives a field that the user can use to select multiple elements.
• Page – This item type allows for the construction of a customized "thank you" page that the user will see once the form has sent. 
• Password- This item type is just a text area field where the user sees asterixes instead of letters and numbers (e.g.: *****). This is not encrypted AT ALL! (see note below about the possibility of encryption)
• Rich Label- Like the label field this item type seems to be mostly for adding text to the form, but unlike label field you can make this text have whatever styling you like because you can create it with the FCK editor.
• Rich Text- This item type allows you to incorporate rich text, similar to the normal pages in the CMS, into your form.
• Save Data adapter- Choose this item to enable the downloading of form submissions as a comma or tab-delimited flat file.
  

  Caution: While viewing this, once submissions are contained, be sure not to accidentally press the "Clear Saved Input" button.  It will instantaneously erase all submissions!

• Selection Field- This item type makes either a drop-down menu or a series of radio buttons. To create one, put a list of options, with one option per line in the text area when creating it.
• String field- This item type gives a single-line text field area. This field can alternately be set to hidden as well so it will send information in the email, though the user won’t see it. String fields also have an option for including a validator that can validate the input as being an email address, phone number, URL, zip code, etc. This is the item type found in the "email" and "subject" fields of the default form.
• Text field- This item type gives a text area that the user can fill in. You can specify the number of lines, to make the box bigger by default. This is the item type of the "comments" field on the default form.
• Thanks page- This allows you to make alternate “Thank you” pages that can be chosen for the form. This is like the Page item type, but it allows for my dynamic functionality such as pre-pended and appended text, and the choice of showing the user what they added to the form or not, based on some or all of the form items.

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