- What is a Build Form (aka App)?
- Building a Form
- Building a Workflow
- Testing/Validating a Form
- Publishing & Sharing a Form
What is a Build Form (aka App)?
In a world where digital interactions are pivotal, designing forms that are not only efficient but also user-friendly and engaging is crucial. Kuali allows you to create your own form to gather necessary data for a given use case. Whether that's creating apps for unique processes or building a form within our standard Kuali Products (Ready, Research, Student) we want to make the process as user friendly and configurable as possible to meet your business process needs. This includes building and maintaining the form with any necessary updates throughout the life of the application with ease and the ability to validate/test prior to publishing.
A form is simply a place you gather information and the appropriate review path for creating documents. It's a collection of fields that you build to gather data from your users in the most user friendly and efficient way. When creating a form in Kuali it will consist of the below pieces:
- Form
The place where you build the layout of the document with the given sections and fields required to gather the necessary information for the given process.
- Workflow
the review path for the form when a user completes and submits the document. This could be gathering Approvals, Acknowledgements, Tasks, sending Notifications, triggering Integrations, etc. Whatever is necessary for the form to be fully reviewed by the necessary parties at your institution can be built into the workflow area of the form.
More information on the lifecycle of the form creation process is explained more in depth below.
Building a Form
Building a form in Kuali is super user-friendly so non-technical users can create and update forms with ease. With a variety of field gadgets and formatting options, you can build forms to accomplish any of your business process needs.
After you initiate a new form/app you can then start dragging and dropping the desired form gadgets from the left menu to your form and configuring as needed. You can organize your form using Sections and then drop in the desired gadgets (i.e. Rich Text field, Dropdown, Number, File Upload, Data Lookup, etc.). The form possibilities are endless and the easy configurability allows you to build the form that best fits your use case!
We have a wealth of resources in the Form Building Basics section of the Getting Started area of our Knowledge Base. Below are a few articles we want to highlight to get you started:
- Guide to Form Design
- How to Create a Form
- Form Gadget Overview
- Adding and Editing Sections in a Form
- Editing a Gadget (Field) in a Form
- Deleting a Gadget (Field in a Form
- Office Use Only Setting
Building a Workflow
A forms workflow allows you to build a custom review path for the document to take after a user submits a document. This could be adding an Approval step for a Supervisor, a Task step for the Department Group to complete a section of the form, a Notification to alert the submitter when it's approved, etc. The possibilities are endless and it's all customizable; including the notifications that will send with each workflow step configured!
You also have the option of making certain sections in a form hidden, view only, or editable for a given step in workflow. And if you want to trigger certain workflow paths depending on responses in the form you can use Branch steps to configure that logic.
We have a wealth of resources in the Form Workflow Overview section of the Getting Started area of our Knowledge Base. Below are a few articles we want to highlight to get you started:
- Creating a Workflow
- Creating an Approval Step
- Creating a Denial Step
- Creating a Task Step
- Creating an Acknowledge Step
- Creating a Notification Step
- Creating a Branch Step
- Creating an Integration Step
- Creating an Echo Step
- Workflow Settings
Testing/Validating a Form
Before you go live with a form you'll want to test and verify the form functions as expected and it routes in the desired path. In form builder Kuali allows you several ways to preview your form and test the lifecycle before publishing to your end users. Within the form itself you can toggle from design to preview to view how the form will display to your end users. Additionally, within the workflow tab of the form you can utilize the workflow simulator tool to walk through the entire form lifecycle (from form creation to submission to each workflow step until completion).
We have a wealth of resources in the Form Design and Creation Basics and Form Workflow Overview sections of the Getting Started area of our Knowledge Base. Below are a few articles we want to highlight to get you started:
- What is Draft Mode?
- How and Where to Test your App before Going Live
- Testing Workflow - Workflow Simulator Tool
Publishing & Sharing a Form
After you finish testing and validating your form, the next step is to assign the appropriate permissions and publish. You'll want to make sure the appropriate users or groups have been assigned the appropriate level of access to the new app and its associated documents (i.e. view, edit, create, etc.). You can also configure conditional permissions that allow access based on data completed in the form.
Once you've assigned the appropriate permissions you can publish the form. If it's the first publish the app will not be available to your configured users until that initial publish action. And if you have subsequent updates to your form those changes will not be pushed out until you take the publish action.
We have a wealth of resources in the Form Design and Creation Basics section of the Getting Started area of our Knowledge Base. Below are a few articles we want to highlight to get you started:
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