Today’s tutorial is packed full of information, so grab a cup of coffee and settle in! The Forms Feature in TouchDown is not the most used feature in TouchDown, but it has amazing functionality for those who need forms on the go. Forms are a great way to communicate similar information across various occurrences: Imagine you are an IT Tech headed to an onsite visit and need to communicate status, photos and conclusions to your boss in an email, or that you are a team member and have a daily meeting for which results need to be shared with your team via email. Fire up Forms in TouchDown, create your items to create in the forms (say, time of event, findings, photo, conclusion, next steps, etc), then send the result to your specified recipients in a nicely formed email. Super useful, right? Here’s Dragonfly, our Tech Support Guru, to tell you how:
Hi,
Dragonfly here, and I’m going to talk about one of the less used, but still very cool features of TouchDown: Forms. The TouchDown form generator allows you to create your own forms that can easily be edited to include various fields, such as Date, text fields, checkboxes, etc, so an end user who imports a form can enter just a few values, and automatically generate an email that incorporates said values. Today, I’m going to demonstrate basic form creation and deployment in this tutorial. You can read more about TD forms here: https://nitrodesk.zendesk.com/entries/37112027-Mobile-Forms-Installation-User-s-Guide
To start, download the forms generator here: tinyurl.com/tdforms.
Another thing you may want to have is Outlook, so you can send the form out easily when it’s been created. But, it’s easy enough just to save it if you don’t haveOutlook.
First, download the file, and once you open it, choose ‘Design new form.’
This is the main Forms interface. The screens are as follows:
1. General: allows you to save and send the form
2. Screens: allows you to control the content of the screens
3. Generated data: allows you to control the outgoing email
4. Recipients: controls who gets the results of the form
5. XML View: to view the code.
Now, before I start building the form, I will need to plan out what I want to do with it. For this example, I decided to do something a little more whimsical- I’m going to create a character sheet for a generic tabletop Role playing game, but it should demonstrate some of the basic capabilities of forms that can be applied to just about anything.
First, I’m going to create my first screen. It’s going to show the character creation and date. To do this, I click ‘add screen’.
Now, you can see I’m on the name screen. To add functions to it, I drag and drop them into the main area, and then, using the menu on the right, add attributes so they make sense and aren’t just random fields.
Note the field on the side that is used to set attributes. This comes in very handy as it allows you to customize what the various fields do and look like.
Now I’m going to edit the field for the name text box. Nothing fancy here, just changing the general label and name from ‘Nameless’ to ’Name’ so the user knows to put the character name in there.
I add a label to the date field as well. Now that I’m done with that, I’m going to create a button that will go to the next page, which will be where I store the player stats. I click on the advanced field and hit the … button
Creating buttons to control the navigation of the form is essential, otherwise there will be no way to send, cancel, or go to other screens.
One that shows up, I create a new button. Since it’s going to the Stats page, I set the destination as Stats, and set the Label as ‘Next’.
Now, I create the stats page.
I add several text boxes for various numerical stat values, remembering to add names and labels, but I also add a drop down menu for the player class.
To do this, I drag the dropdown over, and assign it a label, then click on Misc to add a few character classes. Lastly, I click on a blank spot in the area to add a next button, like I did last time, to go to the ‘Inventory’ screen.
Adding a drop-down label
Drop down options for player classes
Now for the final screen, I’m going to include a checkbox to show that functionality. I add two text boxes for player’s inventory and skills, then ∫to determine if this is the person’s primary character. The checkbox serves to add a true/false after the selection, so it’s useful for Boolean situations.
The primary character button. Remember to add a correct ID/Label to every field.
Since I’ve decided that his is enough data to get a sense of what the character is, I create my done button. I click on an empty space in the screen, then pull up the navbutton editor.
Note that since this is the last screen, the “IsDone field” can be set to True.
Now that we have a list of fields and screens the user will interact with, I go to the Generated Data screen. I choose ‘Email Subject’ as the editable field, and enter ‘Character Sheet’ then switch to the body, and drag and drop the fields I would like to edit there. Since I don’t want to create a big block of text, I add a little HTML formatting.
Note the <p> and <br> to break it up.
Adding myself on the recipients tab.
On the recipient tab, I add myself, click save, and then go back to the General tab and Save, then hit Send.
I send it to myself, and it comes in as an attachment. After long pressing on it, I choose ‘Import Form,’ and TouchDown gives me the message that it is importing.
The email from Outlook
In the inbox, I hit menu>select form, and choose the form there.
Then, I go through the screens:
Changing his character class
And this is what the output looks like:
A completed character.
Eventually I plan on showing off more functionality with Forms, but this should help you get a better introductory understanding of how they work and what their abilities are. If you have any questions about forms, please let us know at support@nitrodesk.com.
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