What is a form?

Forms are one of the most powerful data collection tools in Experiential Learning Cloud. A form replaces a paper-based process with an electronic version that students, faculty, and staff complete directly in the platform.

Before jumping in, see What Experiential Learning Cloud's Forms Can Do for what's possible.

To build one, you need the right role and a form record to build into. This article covers both.

Once your form record is set up, continue to Building Your First Form for a walkthrough of the builder itself.

Get the Program Setup role

Form Builder lives in the Program Setup | Customization environment, and only users with the Program Setup role can reach it.

1. Go to Program Management | Staff & Students.
2. Find the user in the Users table and expand their record.
3. Open the Roles and Tags tab.
4. Click Add (+) at the top right of the table, select Program Setup, and click Add.

Note: If you assigned the role to yourself, log out and log back in before continuing. The role does not take effect mid-session.

Choose how to create your form

Go to Program Setup | Customization, open the Forms workspace, and click Add (+) at the top right of the table. You have three options.

Option	Best for
Forms Gallery	Starting from a pre-built template for a common need.
Create Pro Form	Most forms. Required for rubrics, dataflow, and form logic.
Create Lite Form	Simple, single-signer forms such as waivers, consent forms, and site ranking forms.

Note: A Lite form cannot be converted to a Pro form later. If there is any chance your form will need a rubric, logic, or dataflow, start with Pro.

The rest of this article covers the settings on a Pro form record.

The Form Record

Every form starts with a record that defines what the form is, what it attaches to, and how it behaves. The numbers below match the callouts in the image.

Form Information

• Number (1) — a unique identifier for the form. The convention is your institution's code, a hyphen, then the next number in sequence.
  • Forms built by Lumivero start at 1000. Start your own forms at 1 so the two are easy to tell apart. For example: SCHOOL-1, SCHOOL-2.
• Name (2) — what appears throughout the database. Describe the form's purpose, such as "Field Evaluation — Midterm."
• Description — optional. A short summary of what the form is for.
• Notes — optional, and useful for details you'll want later: who built the form, when, or which rubric it connects to.

Forms Gallery

These settings control whether your form appears in the Forms Gallery for reuse.

• Show in gallery — makes the form available as a template.
• Gallery tags — categorizes the form within the gallery.
• Gallery image — click Generate thumbnail to create a preview image of the form.

Behavior

• Use in documents for (3) — whether the form is about a User or a Site. This also determines which database fields the form can reach.
• Document type (4) — the form's category. Some types carry special behavior — a Partnership Agreement, for example, requires users to provide an end date when they start the form.
  • For user documents, Other covers most cases.
  • For site documents, Site Profile and Partnership Agreement are the most common choices. If neither fits, use Site Notes.
  • The full list lives in the Tags workspace, under the Document Types tab.
• Active — whether the form can be used once published.
• Form tags — optional. Used when a form has a specific function, such as a Site Profile or Supervisor Information Form.
• Programs (5) — which program or programs the form belongs to.
• Form extends link table — gives the form its own tab on each user's profile, rather than living only in their documents. Useful when the form collects custom fields you want visible on the user record.
• Read only — prevents the form from being edited.

Extra linked tables (6) - COMING SOON

Extra linked tables connect your form to the User or Site tables so it can autofill information already stored in Experiential Learning Cloud. Instead of asking a student to retype their name, ID, and program, the form can pull those values directly.

1. Click Add to the right of the Extra linked tables section.
2. Choose the Database Table the form should draw from, such as st_staff for a staff member or user profile, or loc_location for a site.
3. Choose the Link type, which narrows the table to a specific role — for example, Student on the st_staff table.

Once a table is linked, its fields become available to nodes on the form.

Note: Add your linked tables before you start building. Fields from a linked table are only available to nodes after the link exists.

Buttons

• Open Form Builder (7) — opens the builder so you can start adding fields.
• Clone form (8) — duplicates the form. You'll need to give the copy a new number and name. Useful when building a second form that shares most of its fields, especially for dataflow.
• Preview form — shows how the form will look to your users.
• Import from spreadsheet — builds a form from a prepared spreadsheet instead of by hand.
• Save checkpoint — saves a snapshot of the form, like a save point in a game. Requires a version number and a description.
• Restore checkpoint — rolls the form back to a previous checkpoint.

Tip: When you save a checkpoint, describe what you were working on. A month later, "Added supervisor signature section" is far more useful than "v3."

Next steps

With your form record set up, click Open Form Builder and continue to Building Your First Form.

Related articles

• Building Your First Form
• Form Builder: Menus & Options
• Form Builder: Node Types
• Form Builder Lite (FBL) Overview
• Form Builder: Editing Published Forms
• How to Build a Rubric