Forms info: Creating

How to create a form from scratch

There is a link on the forms main page called Create a new form (from scratch). Click on this link to create a form.

You will see a page asking you for some form-wide data. Notes about the field Your name are in Good manners. Notes about passwords are in 05_Security.

The e-mail address field provides the users an easy way to contact you in a problem situation. It can be left empty.

Form title should be short and descriptive. This is the name the form will be know by in the system.

Form description is a text that will be shown in the beginning of the form, as one paragraph. It should contain an explanation of the purpose and focus of the form. It might also contain e.g. some informational text about the happening / course / whatever the form is related to.

When you have filled in the form data, click Register to enter the form into the database. See 04_Modifying on how to add questions to the form.

Creating a form as a duplicate of an existing form

On the form editing list page, each form has a link named duplicate next to it. Clicking on this link will take you to a screen like the one for creating a form from scratch, except that the title and the form description are already filled in (you can edit them, though).

The new form will be put into the database when you click Register. It will contain copies of the questions of the original form, and you can add some more or delete the old ones at will.

Good manners

You should give enough information (full name, or something equivalent) to identify you in the Your name field. This field will be shown next to the form title in the form listing, and exists to tell users who is responsible for the form.

Spend some effort on thinking how to give people enough information to answer to the questionnaire. An obscure form can be very irritating, more so if answering is important.

Often if a form is very official, people tend to put too much obligatory fields in it. There is no way to enforce answering a question (which I think is good), but you should also think twice before putting something like (fill this field or else...) in a question.

The results are, at the present, publicly viewable by anybody. Please do not encourage people to give sensitive information via this system.