Forms

In Zengine, a form can be created to collect data for a specific purpose.  For instance, you might have a customer form that holds customer data, a project form that holds project data, a leads form that holds lead data, a timesheet entry form that may hold timesheet entries, and so on. In traditional database terms, a form is similar to a table.

Overview

Each form within a Workspace contains different fields of data. For instance, if you had a form to hold a list of your contacts, the fields may be "first name," "last name," "address," etc. In other words, if you had your data in a spreadsheet list where each contact was on its own row, a field would equate to a column in your spreadsheet.

Many times you will only need to use one form in a workspace, but Zengine allows you have one or more forms in a workspace. The forms can be distinct from each other, but often times, you will want to link them together. This allows different sets of data to be collected from a portal user (an applicant, for example), or added by administrators, at different points in time on different forms, while still maintaining a connection between the records these forms that represent the same person, organization, or other entity.

For example, you may have a list of companies in one form and a list of contacts in another form. Zengine lets you link them so that when you enter a contact you can attach that contact to a company.  When you look at the company, you can see a list of all of the linked contacts.

Your forms will show up on the Data tab of your Workspace (currently selected in the image below).

In the above screenshot, you can see that this workspace contains 11 forms: Applicant Email, PROFILES, Application, Award Details, and 7 other forms accessed via the More dropdown.

Selecting the respective tabs will present you the existing data for that particular form. This view is called the Data View.

Creating Forms

Forms can be created manually through our  Form Builder or by utilizing existing data through an Import.  These methods and step by step guides are covered in their respective articles.

Form Uses

Forms can be utilized for internal use only, where you and other  workspace members add and manage data from within your workspace.

Alternatively, forms can be set to be external-user facing, meaning that they will be associated with a submission portal or review portal to be shared with others (such as applicants to a program, or reviewers who will complete review feedback on assigned submissions). These external portal users will complete one or more forms and submit them in different stages. Each form that is filled out by an portal user will appear on the data view of a form as a new record containing the submitted information.

Reordering, Deleting, and Adding Forms

In you would like to reorder forms in your workspace or make other changes, navigate to Settings & Tools in your workspace by selecting the "gear" icon in the upper right corner of any page.

(Note that this icon will only be visible if you are logged into Zengine as an Administrator. For more information on workspace roles and permissions, see the articles Permissions and Standard Roles.)

In the Settings & Tools page, select the Forms tile under Workspace Settings.

The Forms page will look like this:

You can add a new form by clicking the green "+Add Form" button at the top.  You can add up to 200 forms in a workspace. You can edit and delete forms by using the respective icons for that particular form, located on the right side of the form listing for each form:

Finally, you can reorder the forms and how they show on the data view of your workspace by dragging and dropping a form listing:

You can view all of your forms on the data view screen and can search for a particular form you need by using the dropdown menu search bar under More.

Renaming Forms

Forms can be renamed on Settings tab of the Form Builder for a specific form. You can also change the Record Identifier and add a Form Purpose.

For more information, see the article Form Builder Overview (Form Settings). 

Form Groups

As you add more forms to your workspace, you may wish to group them based on what their purpose is.  For example, you may have a set of forms that pertain more to the application intake process (as opposed to, for example, the awarding or reporting processes) and so you may want to group those forms into a group called Application Intake.  The form groupings will be listed in the top left corner of your data view page.

By selecting the Application Intake group from the dropdown, now only the forms selected to be in this group (Applicant Email, Profiles, Application, and Letter of Recommendation) will display.

Note that the forms in a Form Group will appear in the same order as they appear on the Forms list. To change the order of forms in a Form Group, simply reorder the list of forms by dragging and dropping them in the desired order. This will affect the order of forms in all Form Groups. For more information, see the section above Reordering, Deleting, and Adding Forms. 

To learn about how to create and manage Form Groups, see the article Form Groups.

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