This is the second part of the Forms feature, highlighting some useful tips & where to start when Business rules is not enough.

Episode 7: Forms Pt2

Transcript

With forms, if business rules don’t meet your requirements, you may have to resort to Javascript. These little code snippets allow you to do pretty much anything on a form that is not possible in business rules, but be warned, Javascript nowadays is frowned upon. It is code for a start, so you need a skilled professional to create and maintain it. Use it as a last resort.

Each form has a library of files you can upload to it, each file containing one or more functions. Each function needs to be associated with an event, such as the load event of the form or a change event for a field.

You can also establish form parameters, which can be used by your scripts. Say you want to ensure only if the user comes from another form, you can use this to pass history from the other form.

Non-event dependencies are a list of fields that are required by scripts. Adding a field to the list locks it to the form.

Back in the maker experience, there are few nice functions to make your life as a designer easier.

In the bottom left is a selection which allows you to visualise how your form will look at certain aspect ratios. As this is the new world of unified interface, this form will be rendered on a phone or tablet as well as a desktop. Here, as the form size is changed, the header section is displayed as the first section. Phone is also the size used for the outlook client.

Header can also be altered, fields added. As you add more than 4 fields, you get a prompt, letting you know that this new field won’t be directly visible on the form, but part of the flyout only. Opening the app, you can see this.

The default option is high density, as we just saw, but you can also choose to untick this to go back to the previous way. This means the fields are editable in the header, but take up more space. Depends on what you want to achieve in your layout. As you can see, as I was in responsive mode, the header gets shifted to the first section of the first tab

In the user experience, now that we are not in high density mode, the fields in the header are editable directly, with the 5th field being available and editable in the drop down

There are 4 types of form you can create. We have mostly been working with Main forms, the default wide forms which we are used to.

Quick view forms are those to show data from a parent entity.

We can also have Card forms, which appear when the user is displaying a list as a series of cards. Generally, if there is not enough space to render a list properly, the UI will shift to display it as a card view.

To show this, on the account form, I add a quick view form to the form, choose the related entity and the form to display.

Also, we can add a new grid to show off the card view. This, as there is little space in the thin column, uses the card view form.

Quick Create is a form which you first have to enable on the entity by editing the properties of the entity.

Once enabled, you can create a quick create form, add some fields to it and save.

When you select quick create on a grid now, it will display a form to the right of the main form, allowing you to quickly add information, and automatically link the new record to the main entity