Building forms in the browser

The form designer builds and edits forms in the browser. Start new form opens it on a blank form; a deployed form's Edit opens it on that form's workbook. It edits the same XLSForm rows you would write in Excel, and keeps any column it does not know, so a workbook that goes through the designer comes back with everything it had.

Questions

The designer offers every question type Joripo runs, by its plain name or its XLSForm keyword. Open a question to edit it:

• Question: the label and hint in each language, required, and the choices;
• Logic: relevance, the constraint and its message, the required message, the calculation, the default and the choice filter;
• Advanced: the appearance, read only, parameters and media.

Appearance shows the appearances the question's type takes as switches; you can still type any other, and the designer says when Joripo's form runtime does not use one. Move up and Move down move a question or a whole group one place at a time, into groups as well as out of them.

Labels: plain text or HTML

Each label and hint has a Plain text / HTML switch. In plain text, the phone shows exactly what you type, even a <. In HTML you write the markup yourself (<b>, <i>, <span style="color:red">), with buttons for bold, italic, underline, a line break and a colour, and a preview drawn as the phone will draw it. A label that already holds markup opens in HTML.

Checked as you type

Relevance, constraints, calculations, choice filters, repeat counts and the other expressions are checked as you type, by the same rules an upload uses: a problem is shown under its box in the words a deploy would refuse it with. A constraint that cannot be read is shown as a warning: as on upload, the form deploys and that answer is not checked.

Media

Each question, note and group, and each choice, has an image, audio and video box per language. Upload… picks the file; it is sent with Deploy and becomes an attachment of the new version, and the box says whether the form already has a file of that name. A file with the name of one the form already has replaces it, for every question and choice that names it. A different file with the name of one already chosen for another box gets a name of its own (image_2.png), since on the phone one name is one file.

Settings, spreadsheet view and deploying

Form settings holds the title, version, default language, instance name and languages. Spreadsheet view shows the sheets as they would look in Excel. Download .xlsx gives the workbook without deploying; Deploy runs the same checks as an upload and publishes a new version.

Not kept yet

• The Plain text / HTML choice itself is not saved: the workbook has no column for it, so a label reopens in whichever mode its content suggests.
• Choice labels have no Plain text / HTML switch.
• A media file chosen but not yet deployed is lost if you leave the page.
• There is no "Move to group…" dialog: move a question into a group one place at a time.