I have a multipage form that collects the following information for Single individuals or Married/Cohabiting Couples. The pages are broken down into the following sections:
Applicant 01: Contact information
Applicant 01: Personal Info (Religion, DOB, Height, Weight, Phys. Description, etc.)
Applicant 01: Employment Information (Employer, Job Title, Salary, etc.)
Applicant 01: Health Information (Current Health, Allergies, Hospitalizations, etc.)
Marital History (Marriage Date, Separations, etc.)
Family Composition (Children, other adults in home, etc.)
Home ( No. Bedrooms/Bathrooms, inside/outside city limits, etc.)
References (Contact information for 3 references required)
User Preferences
Agency Preferences
The expectation is that the form will not be completed in one sitting (as the user may need to locate or request certain information), ergo we have enabled save and continue.
In addition to these 16 pages, there are two other supporting pages so that this winds up being one long form! Especially depending on whether the applicant is single or represents a couple.
Questions:
Should I break this form into multiple forms?
If so, how do I keep the relationships for each form for each user (in case of edits, etc.)?
Hi Preston. My recommendation would be to use multiple forms, so you are not trying to load the form into the browser memory all at once (that is what happens with any form, even a multi-page form.) There are a couple tools that can help you with making this happen:
This can help you link forms together in a flow, and can also be used to offer a checklist of forms to be completed:
This can be used to pass data easily from one form to the next:
Save and continue can be used with those solutions as well, in the event that any one of those numbered forms is still very long and may not be completed in one setting. Let us know if you have any other thoughts. Thank you.
I’m particularly interested in the checklist functionality. Do you know if these two applications work together, or at least don’t clash when used together?
Hi Preston. I don’t know for sure if they work together, but I suspect they work fine. If you have any specific questions, I would reach out to those plugin’s authors for assistance. They also have their own return policies, in the event you wanted to try this out to see how they can work together. Thank you.
Your suspicions are correct Chris Regardless of how the individual form(s) are submit, both plugins will take the appropriate action.
Preston - Along with the checklist component of Gravity Flow, our User Input step has settings to let a user save before submitting. So the 5 activities you outline for Applicant 1 could be 5 separate steps each having save/complete buttons but only the appropriate fields for edit are available. If your workflow is quite linear this may be a simpler setup than multiple forms.
If you do go with multiple forms, our Form Connector extension also provides some flexible options for creating new entries (either at form submission or as steps along the workflow) as well as updating field values between different forms.
Sounds like a big and interesting project. Good luck!
Regardless of how the individual form(s) are submit, both plugins will take the appropriate action.