Tracking form information

Consider including a forms control section in your form to help track key information about the form and its status.

On this page:

• Overview
• Example
• What you might include
  • Form characteristics​
  • Form variables
  • Project control

Overview

Not all useful information about a form is immediately available to you as an author. You might have to check form or control settings to look up the information, or it's something that isn't part of the form unless you put it there. Essentially, this is form metadata.

Consider designing a forms control section that serves authors across your ministry or sector and including it in a form template.

You can include as much or as little as you like, but keep in mind that data stored will be part of the form definition's XML, so don't include anything sensitive.

Example

You can view a demonstration of what form control could look like on the Forms Control demonstration form.

What you might include

Common items you might include are:

• The form number, not visible in the Form Editor
• The organization the form belongs to
• Who will approve the form changes
• Who is editing the form
• The form's status for activating a test layer
• The email address submissions go to

You can keep some or all of these in a single group, or split these across a few if you like.

Form characteristics

Changes you make can have an effect on certain settings and functions of your form, and these are not always easy to notice without thorough testing and checking numerous places.

For example, if your form uses a PDF template, then changes to the web form may mean making changes to the template as well.

Having a list or note of these factors can help make it easier to figure out what additional changes may need to be made.

Form variables

Some forms use a set of variables, such as rates or allowances, for calculations. These rates may change periodically.

Instead of embedding these values directly into calculations, you can define them in one place and refer to those definitions in your formulas.

This will make a future update very easy and avoid the potential for one or more calculations to be missed.

Project control

Since changes are tied to requests or projects, you might want to include a summary of the change being made (or last made) and a reference to where you're keeping the records, such as a ticketing system.

Other options could include a checklist of requested changes, which have been made, and the workflow stage it's at.

This section's content and design should take any other project tracking and monitoring system into account.