Your form is composed of many different types of fields. Fields are what you use to capture the information you are interested in. Fields can only exist within a page in your form. Form structure (including fields, groups and pages) is covered in detail here.
This article explains how to work with fields in your form.
Add new fields
To add a new field to a page, you can either click on the 'Add Field / Group' button at the bottom of the page (1), or hover and click in-between the fields where you want to add the new field (2).
Choose the type of field you want to add from the drop-down (3).
The new field details will be expanded. The field will be given a default name (4), but this can be edited, as long as it is unique within the form, starts with a letter or an underscore ('_') and only contain letters, numbers or underscores. You will need to capture the field text that will be displayed on the handset (5). The other field properties (6) can be edited immediately or at a later stage.
You can also duplicate existing fields in your form by clicking on the 'Duplicate' icon on the right of the field (7). Duplicating a field adds an exact copy of the field (including answer format, validation, skip logic, default values, hint text and translations) directly below it.
Reorder fields
Fields will follow each other in the order they appear on the console (unless you have added skip logic to adjust this order). You can easily reorder the fields in your form by clicking on a field and dragging it to where you want it to appear.
Alternatively, you can also reorder fields using the navigation panel on the left-hand side by clicking and dragging the fields to their new place.
Note: When reordering fields, make sure that any skip logic that you have applied previously still make sense.
Edit fields
You can edit your fields at any stage:
Click on the field you want to edit to view its details.
The available tabs will depend on the field type. This can include:
- Basics - set the field response to be required or optional, add hint text (optional), set a default response (optional) and choose an answer format (if applicable - only editable until published).
- Option list - manage a Choice field's options (only available for Select, Cascading and Likert field types).
- Skip logic - add rules for when to show or hide a field.
- Validation - add rules to determine whether a response is valid or not.
- You can edit the field's name (its identifier) and display text (what the fieldworker will see) at any time by clicking on it.
Note: Only one field's details can be expanded at a time.
Delete fields
If you no longer want a field to appear in your form, you can delete it:
- Click on the field you want to delete.
- Select the 'bin' icon on the right-hand side.
- Confirm that you want to delete this field.
The field will be removed from your form, but all responses received for this field up to that point (if any) will still be accessible in the Analyse tab. The deleted fields will be hidden in the analyse tab by default, but you can choose to show it if required.
Note: if you accidentally deleted a field, you can undo the action. However, once you've published your changes, you will not be able to reinstate the deleted field.
Lock fields
By default, all fields can be edited by a user with form design permissions. In some cases however you may want to lock a field to prevent other users form editing or deleting the field. This may be useful to ensure that forms are not broken by editing or removing of certain fields.
To lock a field, open the Advanced tab the field you wish to lock and check the box "Lock editing of this fields for other users".
An icon in the top right corner of the field will indicate that you have locked the field.
Locked fields can only be unlocked and edited by the user that locked the field or the Account Owner. In multilingual forms, fields are locked across all languages.
Note: Locking fields is only available on Standard plan subscriptions and above.