Importing Forms

Importing iCM Forms and Groups

Exports of iCM forms include the forms themselves and the form group structure.

If you want to keep the group structure of the export, right-click on the root FORMS folder and choose "Import forms..." The forms will be imported, along with the groups they were originally in.

If you only want to import the forms, right-click on an existing group and choose "Import forms into group..." The forms will be imported into this group and the group structure in the export file ignored.

If iCM already contains forms with the same names as those in your import, you'll be prompted to "Overwrite", "Ignore" or "Rename" imported forms. You can also view the differences.

When groups are imported they will be ignored if they already exist and are in the same structure, they'll be added if they already exist but are in a different structure (that's because group names don't have to be unique). Groups will conflict if they have the same name but a different description, in which case you'll be prompted to "Overwrite", "Ignore" or "Rename".

In all cases you can choose whether the forms are imported as work in progress, published, or published "for production" (ie with debug and tracing disabled). iCM will prompt  you to select the export file you would like to import. Find and select the file and then confirm the import by clicking "Continue this import" in the action panel.

When importing and exporting forms, be careful when moving them between iCMs with different release versions. Older forms will work in newer (higher) versions, but the reverse is not always true. For example, forms created in 10.0.7.0 should not be imported into 10.0.5.0, but forms created in 10.0.5.0 can be safely imported into 10.0.6.0 or 10.0.7.0.

Import from HTML

When creating a form, it's possible to copy and paste source HTML directly into the designer which will recreate the form using standard iCM field types.

To import the source HTML of a page containing a form, view the page source using your browser's developer tools. You'll often see "view page source" as an option when you right click on a web page.

Select all of the HTML and copy it.

In the forms designer, open the Design tab, then click "Import from HTML" in the left hand action panel. Paste your copied source HTML into the pop-up window. You might need to use the keyboard shortcut keys Ctrl+V (Cmd-V on a Mac).

Click "Ok".

The HTML will be parsed for form labels and input controls and these will, as far as possible, be mapped to a suitable iCM field type. If the imported HTML contains several forms, each form's fields will be imported onto a different page of the iCM form.

The imported fields and pages should be reviewed very carefully. These fields are only intended as a starting point and the quality of the generated fields will depend on the quality of the HTML that was imported.

With dynamic forms that are built up using JavaScript, some of the fields may not be imported by simply importing the page source. Try using a browser with JavaScript disabled as this will cause the page to render differently.

Note that in either instance, any JavaScript embedded with the source form will not be imported. This import function only creates the fields themselves and all other functionality will have to be added as normal.