Form Builder
How the Form Builder works
The Form Builder works by taking one of your form Views and converting that configuration into an attractive form to publish on your website. The module lets you choose a template set (a group of templates, each determining the appearance of different aspects of the form) to precisely control the appearance of the published forms. The Form Builder window let's you visually build your form by choosing options in the left sidebar. When you're ready to publish the form, you click the Publish Action Button at the bottom right to specify where it should get generated, then click "Publish" and you're done!
In a nutshell, that's how it works!
A little more info about Views
A Form Tools form can have any number of Views. The View controls various aspects of your published form, for example:
- What form fields should appear,
- The order the fields should get listed,
- How the fields are grouped within a page, and
- Whether the fields are arranged into tabs when editing the data in the Form Tools interface.
Since Views already define all this for us, the Form Builder simply takes that information and renders it with templates, thus creating your form. Any time you change your form View (e.g. add or remove fields to it), any published form that uses it will be automatically updated to show the changes. You don't need to re-save or re-publish the form.
Template Sets
The template sets govern exactly how your published form will look. The Template Sets let you customize the HTML, CSS and any javascript you wish to include in the form pages.
A template set is comprised of multiple templates, each used to generate a particular part of the page. For example, there are Header and Footer templates, a Continue Block and Navigation templates. If your template set contains more than one of each type, you will be given the option of selecting it in the "TEMPLATES" section of the Form Builder sidebar. In effect, this lets you re-use the same template set multiple times, but generate different-looking forms each time.
For a more in-depth look at template sets, choose the Form Builder module from your Modules page, select a Template Set and click around the interface to see how it's put together.