Designing a Form: Layout, Validations, Actions and Defaults

In the context of Evotix 360: what is a Form?

In the application, Forms are usually representing a "Business Process", or they contain "Referential Data". Examples are:

• Business Processes:
  • An Incident Report, e.g.: A Visitor tripped in the corridor, because it was too dark.
  • An Action, e.g.: Fix the broken light in the corridor.
• Referential Data:
  • All the Locations and Departments within the Company.
  • The Persons working in the Company.

A Form will contain all the relevant information for each record in the system. Whenever a record is being created, modified or viewed, the user will access a Form to perform these tasks.

The Forms themselves will consist of one, or many Pages.

What is involved in creating a new Form?

Before starting to design a from, we strongly suggest that you discuss the following with the End Users of the application:

• What information is needed for each Business Process, or each form? Which fields do need to be shown on a form?
• How will this information be presented?
  • In which order does the information need to be entered?
  • Is the information shown on one, or on several pages?
  • If there are several pages, will there be some rules which will govern if/when these pages are revealed?
    • For example: the 'Sign Off' Page is only shown once the question "Is this record ready to be signed off?" has been answered with YES.
• Are there some fields which are mandatory, and MUST be filled in before the records can be saved?
• Will it be necessary to trigger other Business Processes from within the current Business Process? This Processes will be represented as "Subforms".
  • Example: create Actions from within an Incident.
• Are Validations necessary, which will help to improve the data quality?
• Once a record is successfully saved, does the system have to perform any Actions?
  • Example: send an Email to the person who assigned this task.
• Will there be fields which will be Defaulted when a new record is created?
• Are some fields READ ONLY?