Overview

In Case Management Studio, forms are the primary way that your end users interact with their cases. Forms allow end users to create and edit cases, and help users provide your case workers and managers with the information that they need to complete a case or address an issue.

Forms are an aspect of and specific to the case type that they are created in. We recommend creating your intake and edit forms while configuring your case type.

This page will provide a brief overview of how forms are used in Case Management Studio and how to create them.

Types of forms

There are two types of forms in Case Management Studio, intake forms and edit forms.

An intake form is one or more steps in a wizard that allow end-users of your process to initiate case creation, such as submitting a maintenance request.

Edit forms allow end users, case workers, or case managers to edit or update the case details.

Creating forms in Studio

All intake and edit forms for your case management apps are created and edited in Studio using a set of tools that allow you to build an entire form without any code.

You can create both intake and edit forms from scratch or by copying an existing form in your case type.

Data fields and form fields

When you create intake and edit forms, each field in the form should be connected to the data fields in the forms' associated case type and case category. This allows the form to save the data input by end users and gets your case workers the information they need.

Creating intake forms

To create and configure a new intake form in Studio:

1. Open your case type and click the Intake Form tab.
2. From the Intake Form tab, click Create Intake Form.
3. Select START FROM SCRATCH.
4. In the Label field in the right pane, add a title to the first page of your form.
5. Drag and drop fields from the left pane onto the page.
6. In the right pane, enter a Label for each field.
7. (Optionally) Enter Instructions to help your users understand the purpose of the field.
8. Select the Required checkbox to make a form field required for submission.
9. Under Stored To, click SELECT DATA FIELD.
10. To store data from the form field to an existing data field in your case type, case category, or all cases select Use Existing Field.
    • Select an existing data field to store the form field data.
    • Click SUBMIT.
11. To store the data from the form field in a new data field, select Add New Field
    • Enter a Name for your new field and choose to add the data field to all cases, the case category, or the case type.
    • Click SUBMIT.
12. Under Validations, click + Add to add validations to your form field.
    • For Criteria, select the validation to apply to the form field, such as a max character count. Fill out any additional information required for the validation.
    • Click SUBMIT.
13. To add a new page to your form, click ADD PAGE in the center pane. You can reorder pages using the arrows.
14. When you've finished configuring your form, click SAVE.
15. Click CLOSE to exit the form builder.

To further customize and configure an intake form built in Studio, a low-code developer can edit the intake form as an interface in Appian Designer.

Creating edit forms

Once you have your intake form configured, you can easily create an edit form based on it.

To create an edit form by copying an existing form :

1. In the Edit Form section, click CREATE EDIT FORM.
2. Click COPY EXISTING FORM. The case type's intake form is selected by default.
3. Make changes to the form as needed and click SAVE.
4. Click CLOSE.

Configuring case management forms in Designer

When you create a form in Studio, we automatically generate an interface for that form in Designer. Having both a form in Studio and an interface in Designer allows you to make use of the benefits of both no-code design tools and the robust capabilities of Appian objects.

Once you've created a form in Studio, you can edit that form as an interface in Designer, practically the same way you would for any other interface. The main noticeable difference is that there are special functions used in case management interfaces. For a full list of these functions and how to use them, see Functions for Case Management Studio.

There are some configurations to forms that you can only make to the interfaces in Designer, such as allowing users to save drafts of forms and adding additional pages to the milestones for create and edit forms. To learn more about these configurations, check out Low-Code Configurations for Case Management Studio.