Forms is a great tool! Unfortunately, we have found a bit of a challenge. The one big list of forms for a given team is unwieldy. We do electrical testing and the plan is to use offline forms to track the results. The challenge is that if we are testing say 100 breakers, now we have 100 forms in one long listed and very limited functionality to organize them. This is complicated by the fact that if I change a value in the offline form and save it, the new value is not reflected in the list instance name (presumably because it is offline and so doesn't update). This makes keeping track of things on the list, like which breakers have completed certain testing steps, impossible. I wonder if there is any way Laserfiche could implement some kind of folder tree structure so that we could better organize them? And also make it so that list is updated the instance id with new field values even when offline? It seems like this would be helpful in other use cases as well in there are a large number of forms being processed.
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Hi Alon,
Thanks for the feature idea. We've heard a few variations of this idea on the Forms side, like categorizing or tagging processes to make them filterable or creating a folder structure for the Manage and Submit forms pages.
Could you explain in more detail what you meant by this
This is complicated by the fact that if I change a value in the offline form and save it, the new value is not reflected in the list instance name (presumably because it is offline and so doesn't update). This makes keeping track of things on the list, like which breakers have completed certain testing steps, impossible.
If you are dealing with an offline form, the values only make it back to Forms once the form has been submitted and it's reconnected back to the Forms server. The instance name cannot be updated if the value is only in an offline draft or submitted but still in an offline outbox.
What version of Forms and LF App are you using?
Hi Jared,
Thanks for your response! We are on Forms 10.2.1.327 and the LF Mobile App version I have is 2019.1.14.185996.
What I meant in the "complicated" comment was that one way to organize or sort the forms might be to update a field in the form that then is reflected in the instance name. Then the list can be sorted based on the instance name. For example, if we have a form that has steps 1 through 3 on it, and we check a box when each step is completed. or something along those lines. I understand that currently this only works if you are no offline. But it would be nice if it worked in offline mode too.
Here is another example of the challenges we are facing. We recently did a project that included 6 different buildings, so we sorted or excel forms into folders for each building. Then we have different types of equipment in each building, so subfolders for that. Each folder contains a form for each specific device. So, for example, there is a low voltage breaker form. In building 1 there are 2 low voltage breakers, so in that folder, we have 2 copies of that form. In addition to all of that there is also the fact that in most cases these buildings don't have reliable internet access, so this all has be done in an offline scenario and then synced when connectivity is available. We are trying to figure out how to use LF Forms to do this, but it doesn't seem to solve this challenge very well.
Thanks for your help,
Alon
One feature other organizations have used to help group forms together is Landing Pages. Forms allows you to select specific processes and group them on a landing page that's accessible by a specific URL. If a user goes to a specific landing page, they'd only see a specific subset of forms. This might help your use case, but does require internet access to reach the landing page.
That's a good tip Jared, thanks! Unfortunately, it isn't that helpful in our case with the need for offline functionality.