How to Create Forms in the Control Panel

What forms are in the Control Panel

In Connected Claims, claim intake forms are the primary way that your end users interact with their claims. These forms allow claimants to create and edit claims and provide your claims adjusters and managers with the information that they need to complete a claim or address an issue.

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

This page will provide a brief overview of how forms are used in Connected Claims and how to create them.

Types of forms

There are two types of forms in Connected Claims, intake forms and edit forms.

An intake form is one or more steps in a guided experience that allows claimants to initiate claim creation, such as submitting a workers compensation request.

Edit forms allow end users, claim adjusters or managers to edit or update the claim details.

Create forms in the Control Panel

All intake and edit forms for your Connected Claims apps are created and edited in the Control Panel using a set of tools that allow you to build an entire form without any code.

Both forms live on the Interfaces tab of a claim type, alongside the claim summary page. Each one appears as a card labelled with its purpose, Create for the intake form, Edit for the edit form, and Display for the summary page, and each card shows a status badge indicating whether it has been configured yet.

You can create both intake and edit forms from scratch. You can also create a new edit form by copying an existing intake form in your claim type.

Data fields and form fields

When you create intake and edit forms, each field in the form must be connected to the data fields in the form's associated claim type and claim category. Connecting each field lets the form save the data that end users enter and gets your claims adjusters the information they need.

Create intake forms

To create and configure a new intake form in the Control Panel:

1. Open your claim type and click the Interfaces tab.
2. On the Intake Form (Create) card, click Create Intake Form.

3. On the Get started building your form screen, click START FROM SCRATCH.

   

4. Click the Page element in the center pane.

   

   • Note: By default, the Page element displays when you start an intake form from scratch.

5. In the Label field in the right pane, add a title to the first page of your form. If you leave the label blank, the milestone for that page displays as Page #.

   

6. Drag and drop fields from the left pane onto the page. The palette groups the available components, such as Inputs for Short Text, Paragraph Text, Number (Integer), Number (Decimal), Date, Date & Time, and Email Address, and Selection for components such as Boolean, Yes/No, and Dropdown.
7. In the right pane, enter a Label for each field.
8. (Optional) If you want to help your users understand the purpose of the field, enter Instructions.
9. Select the Required checkbox to make a form field required for submission.

10. Under Stored To, click SELECT DATA FIELD.

    

    Until a field is stored to a data field, Stored To shows and the Validation section shows Configure data field to enable validation.

11. To store data from the form field to an existing data field in your claim type, claim category, or all claims select Use Existing Field.
    1. Select an existing data field to store the form field data.
    2. Click SUBMIT.
12. To store the data from the form field in a new data field, select Add New Field.
    1. Enter a Name for your new field and choose to add the data field to all claims, the claim category, or the claim type.
    2. Click SUBMIT.
13. Under Validation, click + Add to add validations to your form field.
    1. 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.
    2. Click SUBMIT.
14. To add a new page to your form, click ADD PAGE in the center pane. To reorder or remove a page, use , , and on the page element.
15. When you've finished configuring your form, click SAVE. To undo or redo a change, use and .
16. Click CLOSE to exit the form builder.

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

Create 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 claim type's intake form is selected by default.
3. Make changes to the form as needed and click SAVE.
4. Click CLOSE.

Configure forms in Appian Designer

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

Once you have created a form in the Control Panel, you can edit that form as an interface in Appian Designer, practically the same way you would for any other interface. The main noticeable difference is that there are special functions used in Connected Claims interfaces. These functions are specific to interfaces that the Control Panel generates and cannot be used in other interfaces or applications.

There are some configurations to forms that you can only make to the interfaces in Appian 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.

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