How Adaptive Form Templates Supports Modular Form Design

The most fundamental piece of an adaptive form’s modular design is its template. All adaptive forms require a template to be associated with the creation of a new form to enforce functionality onto the new form such as dynamically adjusting to varying screen resolutions. More importantly for our conversation, templates also push content to the newly created form which can be used to create structured baselines for form authors. The template content is separated between initial content and structural content which further expands the possibilities for templates.

Initial content is pushed when a new form has been created. This content can be used as a placeholder to represent where content should be placed or as preconfigured content removing the need for a form creator to have to manually add the content in themselves. Initial content ideally should be used to empower the form creators and streamline the number of elements they need to create and configure.

Structural content on the other hand, has a continual link back to the template. This means that any time the structural content on a template is changed all forms that are using the template will have the changes automatically cascaded to them, ensuring the most recent version is always in use. Structural content should be used to ensure that required elements are included and configured as required by an organization’s standards and guidelines.

Furthermore, when defining templates, you can lock and unlock the properties of specified elements in the template. Using the lock and unlock features allows you to specify that a specific element can still be configured by the author.

Combining these features allows template creators the power to enforce standards and guidelines while allowing form designers the ability to control the specific form contents. This process reduces the time and effort to make changes to new and existing forms by not needing to run through IT for every content change.  The time to create new forms is also reduced because many of the elements for the new form have already been added initially for the form designer reducing the number of elements they would need to create and configure. Lastly, having the direct link between a form and its templates allows for corporate wide changes to be made in a single change, reducing the maintenance effort to support existing forms.

Templates are just one aspect of how you can drastically improve the process for building and maintaining forms.  We can already see the benefits of isolating ownership of specific aspects of a form to the proper departments along with how having a central location for common elements not only streamlines the process for building new content but also reduces the effort in testing and maintaining existing forms.