Forms are a great way to collect linear data, organized data from clients. Unlike questionnaires which collects data that requires branched logic — if this, then that — forms simply collect data with no logic.

A great use of forms is collecting personal details such as father’s name, mother’s name, date of birth, etc.

In our example we are going to be creating the following form:

 

To start, navigate to the Manage Forms Section

 

Click on “Create New” on the Manage Forms Page

Fill out the basic information of your form:

1. Give your form a meaningful name in the Form Title box so that others will know what the form is about. You’ll define all your company forms here and then attach them to clients and cases. So you may have an internal format to follow like 001-g28, if so, name your form accordingly.
2. You can give a better description of what the form is for or additional instructions in the Form Description box.
3. Auto-Attach is a way to auto-attach the form to clients or cases. For example, if you have a form called Client Intake you probably want to select “All Clients” and the form will auto-attach to every new client you create. If you have a form called Case Pre-Check then you probably want to select “All Cases” and your form will auto-attach to all new cases you create. If you have a form called Immigration Pre-Check and you have a Case Type labeled Immigration, then you can select that Case Type and your form will auto-attach to any case you create with the Case Type of Immigration.
   1. Add To Existing Clients and Add To Existing Cases allows you auto-attach the form to existing clients and cases, respectively. If you do not select this, it will only be auto-attached to new clients and cases, respectively.
   2. If you select something, and realize you do not want to auto-attach the form to anything, you can click on Clear Selection.
   3. If you do not make any selection to auto-attach this form, you will be able to easily attach the form to any client or case from a client or case. We’ll show you how to do that later in this tutorial.

 

Next, we’ll start building our form and defining the data we want to collect. This is easiest if you simply write down an outline of what you want to collect. For example:

• Name Aliases
• Father’s Name
• Mother’s Name
• Birthdate
• Gender
  • Male
  • Female
  • Other
• Preferred Contact Method
  • Email
  • Mail
  • Phone
• Past Crimes
  • Criminal
  • Misdemeanor

Once you have this list, we can start with the first one. We call each main line a Row and the children Options. In our list above Gender is a Row and Male is an Option.

When you first create a new form, you’ll already have your first row:

 

• The word Row will get replaced with the name of the field as you type it in.
• The down arrow just collapses the row to clean up the space when you are creating large forms.
• Order allows you to specify the order the field will show up. We recommend specifying the order in increments of 10 in case you want to add additional rows between in the future.
• Delete trash can will allow you to remove a row. Note that you can toggle a row deleted and undeleted until you click Save. A deleted row will appear transparent. If you click save when in the deleted state, the row will be permanently deleted.

Okay, let’s create our first row….

 

In this example, you can see that we want to collect a client’s Father’s Name. Notice that the word Row was replaced with the word Father’s Name and we added an Order of 2.

• Row Title is the name of the data you want to collect.
• Row Description is to give additional information to the person filling out the form what the row is. You might have a row names G-28 Account # which may not make sense to the person filling out the form. So the description could give additional details about what that is.
• If Required? is checked, then the row must have a value when someone is trying to fill out the form. In our example, if we checked Required?, then they must supply us with a Father’s Name in order to save the results of the form. If Required? is unchecked then this row does not need to be filled in to save the form results.
• The Row Type defines what kind of data this row is collecting. Your options are:
  • Single Line Text Input which presents the user with a simple single-line text field to type in the response. In our example, they will have a simply text box to put in the Father’s Name. 
  • Multi-Line Text Input is the same as Single Line Text Input in that it allows you to type a response, but it allows you to type across multiple lines. 
  • Single Selection Choice (Radio Button) allows you to create a list of choices or Options that a user can select from and only choose ONE option. 
  • Multi-Selection Choice (Checkbox) allows you to define a list of choices or Options where a user can select MULTIPLE answers. 
  • Single Selection Choice (Dropdown/Select) is the same as Single Selection Choice except it presents the list in a dropdown fashion. This is good for long list. 
• Default Value allows you to specify a pre-defined value for text boxes. For example, let’s pretend you are collecting some account number that always starts with S1452-. You could setup your Default Value to be S1452- so users don’t have to type that in every time.

 

In our example list above Name Aliases, Father’s Name ,Mother’s Name, and Birthdate can all be created using either a Single Line Text Input or Multi-Line Text Input. Those are pretty simple.

Let’s move on and create our Gender row. If you remember we want it to have these options:

• Gender
  • Male
  • Female
  • Other

For our Row Type we are going to select Single Selection Choice (Dropdown/Select). Once you do this, you’ll notice a little button for adding options show.

Click this to create an Option. You’ll see a section added that looks similar defining Rows.

Order and Delete work the same as it does for Rows.

• Option Title is what is displayed to the user who is filling out the form. In our Gender example it would be Male, Female, and Other.
• Option Value is the underlying value that is stored. If you are using this form to fill out PDFs, the Option Value is what will be filled in on the form. You may have a form that requires the values of f, m, and o as the value for Gender. That wouldn’t make very much sense though if your form just showed the user f, m, and o as options. So, you can us the Option Title to show a descriptive title for the underlying Option Value. In other cases, the Option Title and Option Value might be the same exact value.
• Option Value Type is a way to tell how the value should be rendered/handled. A PDF might require a boolean value (true/false) to check or uncheck a checkbox. If you just put “true” or “false” in the Option Value it may not work correctly in the PDF. Most of the time, you can just leave this set to text.
• Option Description can be used to give the person filling in the form more information about the option value. This will NOT show up with a Single Selection Choice (Dropdown/Select) .
• Default will indicate if the value is selected by default.

In our Gender example, our Other option might look like this filled out:

That is how you add options for Single Selection Choice (Dropdown/Select). The process for Multi-Selection Choice (Checkbox) and Single Selection Choice (Radio Button) is exactly the same, they just function differently when rendered.

You can add more Options by clicking the “Add Option” button below the option you just created.

 

When you have finished creating your row, you can add more rows by clicking the “Add Row” button at the bottom.

 

When you are finished, click on “Create It” or “Update It”.

Yay! You’ve created your first form.

Now, let’s see how that form works.

If you selected one of the Auto-Attach options, then when you create a client or case (as specified in auto-attach), your form will show up on either that client profile or the case.

For now, we’ll show you how to attach any form to either a case or client.

Navigate to a case or a client and you’ll see the bar titled Case Forms.

Click the Form Button Icon all the way to the right.

You’ll see a screen that shows a list of all your forms. Note that forms that have already been attached will not be shown.

 

Find the form you want to attach and click Attach.

You’ll now see the form is attached.

 

Click on Start to begin filling in the form.

 

Once you have filled in all the required fields (as defined by you), you can click on Submit Answers.

After submitting answers, you will see a Completed Date where the form is attached.

 

Anyone can now click on View to view the responses and make changes if necessary.

There are advanced features that allow you to fill in PDFs with forms. If you need training on these advanced features we offer training for these features.

That’s it for Forms!!!