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Recent Forms Improvements

There have been lots of forms improvements recently, with more on the way. This article summarises the new features.

Repeating Pages

Repeating pages are pages of your form that can be completed more than once. That means a user can complete the same page multiple times, building up a collection of data that's submitted with the form.

The ability to mark pages as repeatable was released back in August, and we've been demoing the functionality in the Community Catch-ups and User Groups. For those of you who missed it, the Update 10.1.0.16 release notes have a summary and links to the full documentation.

Improved Date Picker Field

The Date Picker field type has been reworked to use the HTML5 "date" type. This improves its accessibility, allows it to work without JavaScript enabled, and means the browser will supply a pop-up calendar.

Pages in Edit Mode

The page mode functionality first introduced for repeating pages has now been added to non-repeating pages.

This means that a page that has already been filled out can be navigated back to in "edit mode" and updated, rather than simply navigating back and reloading the page data. The Wizard Buttons are aware of the new edit mode, and provide update and cancel buttons. When you press these new buttons any changes are saved and you are taken back to the page you came from - which will be particularly useful when building "check your answers" pages.

See Page Modes for a full description and links to more information.

Field Prefixes and Suffixes

Text and number input fields can now have prefixes and suffixes:

Prefixes and Suffixes

which is output as:

Field Prefixes and Suffixes

There are more examples in Field Prefixes and Suffixes.

Hint Text Position

This change was asked for by the community as a way to make form layout even more flexible. in previous versions, field hint text was always placed below the field. Now in your form settings you can choose where the hint text appears.

Hint Text Settings

Word Count

The text area input field now includes a word count as well as a character count. See Text Area - Basic for some working examples.

Field Names and IDs

.getCurrentFieldName and .getCurrentFieldID have been added to provide easier access to the name and ID of the current field in your form functions. You can also find new Form Field Blocks for them:

Current Name and ID

Multiline Text Block

A new block in the "Text" section of the code editor lets you generate text with line breaks:

Multi-line Text

All Page Names and Titles

A new block:

getpagenames

returns the names and titles of all of the pages on your form. See .getPageNames for an example.

Resume Session Warnings

This one's a bit more technical.

When a user's session gets interrupted, the text and button displayed on the page is now configurable, which also lets you use internationalisation tokens if you have a multi-language site. See the new "resumeSessionHTML" property in the Forms Service worker.

Last modified on February 13, 2024

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