This video provides an overview of form layout and design.
It introduces features for configuring forms, form views, and related lists.
Linked time codes for these topics appear in the YouTube description for this video.
Let’s start by looking at form views...
... which provide unique configurations of system forms, targeted to users with specific needs for that form.
For example, you may want to present different form fields on the same form for users in HR, IT and Sales.
You can create and configure unique views for each form in the system.
First let’s look at Form Designer, which allows you to add form views, as well as add and remove fields on forms.
Let’s create a new view for the Incident form, and configure its layout.
We’ll start by navigating to the form….
Then, from the form context menu, we select Configure… Form Design.
The admin or personalize_form role is required to configure forms using Form Designer.
Form Designer provides a graphical user interface for configuring forms...
... making it easy to see—as you’re designing—the general layout of sections and fields on the form.
Each form is tied to a unique table and view combination.
Here’s the selected table…
…And here’s the view.
Select the view to configure, or select New to create a new view.
We’ll create a new view for IT users to report hardware issues.
The new view will be based on the layout of the previously selected view...
... which in this case was Default view.
Let’s name this new view IT Hardware Issues …and click OK.
Clicking the plus icon at the top right of a section adds a new section below it.
Let’s add a new section, here.
We’ll name it Configuration Item Specifications...
... and drag Configuration Item into it...
... using the handle at the left of the field.
To add a new field, we drag and drop it from the Fields list.
Oops, this isn’t the field we wanted to add, so we remove it by clicking the X icon at the right of the field.
What we need to add is a new field to track the cost of a hardware incident.
We search the Fields list, but the Incident table doesn’t have any available field related to price or cost.
However, we can add a field to the Incident table to handle this requirement.
We look under Field Types to find an appropriate data type for monetary values.
There is a Price data type, which we add to the form for our new field.
Clicking the gear icon allows us to edit the field’s properties.
Let’s rename it Cost.
Our changes are retained when we close the properties dialog box.
Now we want to the edit the existing Category field, to make Hardware the default value.
Note that you could change the choices that appear on the Category list, here.
Here’s a shortcut you can use to view the properties for each form field without having to click into each one.
Use the up and down arrows to move from one field’s properties to another.
You can add annotations to a form to provide additional information or instructions to users, or to create a section separator.
We’ll use this annotation to prompt users to enter an estimated cost, should some parts need to be replaced.
This is how it will look on the form.
You can change the appearance of the annotation by selecting from the Annotation Type list.
Here are examples of some of these options.
You can also add a formatter, which is a complex form element that can display items related to the current record.
For example, the Contextual Search Results formatter…
…provides links to knowledge articles and other items that may be related to the record.
To test the changes we’ve made to our form, we save our changes…
…and reload the form.
But when the form refreshes, none of the changes we made appear.
That’s because we configured the IT Hardware Issues view of the form...
... not the Default view, which is currently displayed.
When we select the correct view here….
…our changes appear on the form.
The Short description, Description, and Related Search Results fields...
... look like they’re part of the Configuration Item Specification section.
They’re not, but sections without labels, like this third section...
... are incorporated into the previous section.
It would be better if these fields appeared above the Configuration Item Specification section, so let’s fix that.
We can move form sections the same way we move fields…
…by dragging the handle on the left of the section to a new location.
There.
This arrangement makes more sense.
We save it…
…and reload the form.
Yes! This is better!
Now let’s add some more fields to the form using Form Layout, which is another way to configure forms.
With an incident form open, we select Configure…Form Layout from the context menu.
Form Layout provides a list collector interface for configuring forms.
Here, we select the view to modify, or New to create a new view.
In our example, we want to configure the view, IT Hardware Issues, which is already selected.
Here, we select the section to modify.
We’ll add our fields to the form section we created earlier, Configuration Item Specification.
The additional fields we’ll add come from the Configuration Item table...
... a table related to the Incident table.
We want to add the Model number, Asset Tag, and Manufacturer fields to this view.
We can find these fields in the Configuration Item table.
Fields in the Available list that appear in green, followed by a plus sign, represent related tables.
When we select Configuration item, the Expand selected reference field icon appears.
Clicking it refreshes the list to display available fields in the referenced table.
Here’s the Model number…
…and the Asset Tag.
When we move related table fields to the Selected list...
... the displayed value shows the related table where these data items are stored...
... in this case, the Configuration Item table.
When we locate Manufacturer, we can see that it’s also a related table.
By expanding this reference field, we locate the Name field for the manufacturer.
Note that the Configuration Item fields we just added to the form will be editable by default...
... but they could be made read-only via UI Policies.
We navigate back to the incident fields by using the link at the top of the Available list.
We’re done adding fields to the form, so we save our changes.
When the form refreshes, our additional fields appear...
... because we’re already using the form view we configured: IT Hardware Issues.
If your fields don’t appear, make sure the correct form view is selected, here.
Now that we’ve designed the form, we can add related lists so that after a user submits a record...
... the related list data displays with the record.
For our example, we want to see a list of incidents from the same caller when we view an incident record.
We start by opening the form context menu and selecting Configure…Related Lists.
Note that you can configure related lists from a new record as well.
We select the view of the form to edit.
In this case, IT Hardware Issues is already selected.
We select the related list, save it, and the form reopens.
Now we can see the related list in the form.
Note that related lists do not appear in a new record until the record is saved.
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