TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Exporting Forms to Excel
- Importing Forms from Excel
- Example: Changing Font Colors
The Export and Import features in the form designer have several advantages for larger or more complex forms. While making changes to many fields within the form can be time-consuming if done individually within the Form Designer, the process can be sped up significantly if done within Excel. Also, elements from different forms can be combined into the same form within Excel and then re-imported once complete.
Exporting Forms to Excel
To export a form to Excel, click the "EXPORT" button in the upper-right corner of the Form Designer page.
Once this is done, the Notification icon in the upper-left corner of the left-hand nav bar will animate and display an icon indicating the pending export job. Once the export job has finished, a notification message will extend from the icon.
There are three different colors of numbered tags on the Notifications icon, with the number indicating the total for each type of result:
- Green - successfully-completed tasks
- Blue - pending tasks
- Red - failed tasks
Click on the notification button any time, even before a success message has shown, to see the status of the job(s). In the Notifications window that opens, all Ready, Failed and Pending jobs (if any) can be seen. Click on any of the tabs to see the status of the jobs there. For export jobs that have succeeded, click the Download File link in the lower-right corner of the job to download the file.
Open the downloaded file in Excel to see the form in xlsx format. The file will have 4 worksheets:
- Form Fields - this is where all the form fields and properties will be located. Here you can edit the properties as desired or add/remove rows.
- Form Fields Definitions - here you can read definitions of the different form field types, as well as syntax details for many field types.
- Form Settings - view or change form-level settings here.
- Form Settings Definitions - for the above, see information about the form-level settings on this tab.
Once you've finished making changes to the workbook within Excel, save and close it. The form is now ready to be imported back into the form on the platform (see below).
NOTE: The first two rows of the exported xlsx file should NEVER be altered.
Importing Forms from Excel
NOTE: All files must be an Excel (.xlsx) or comma-separated values (.csv) file to be imported.
Within the Form Designer, click the "IMPORT" button in the upper-right corner of the page.
In the "Import Form Fields From File" window that pops up, you'll notice a link to a downloadable template. This template can be used to create a form from scratch (though this is not recommended) or serve as a baseline of comparison for other forms.
Within this window you'll also see several options available to tick via checkbox as well as a click-and-drag button for selecting a file:
- Replace All Existing Fields - checking this box (which is selected by default) will replace all form fields already in the form when the new file is uploaded. If this box is unchecked, all pages from the imported form will be added onto the page(s) already present within the form.
- Replace Settings - Checking this box will replace all form settings outside the field settings with the settings from the imported form.
- Ignore Missing Data Sources - When this box is checked, any form can be imported even if the data sources it links within the form are not found in the target environment. This will be very useful in situations where a linked data source is not being imported along with the form. If this box is left unchecked, the system will throw an error and fail to import the form if a linked data source in the imported form cannot be found.
- Ignore Missing Docs - Similar to the above, checking this box will ignore linked documents in the imported form if they cannot be found.
- Ignore Missing Screens - Also similar, checking this box will ignore and screens that could not be found in the target environment when the form is imported.
Click on the orange upload bar to select a file from your file system, or else click and drag a file onto it. If no errors are detected, the file will be imported into the form.
Example: Changing Font Colors
If you wish to change the field colors within the app and need to make many changes, consider exporting the file, revising the hex codes for the colors and re-importing into the form, per the above steps.
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