A new forms-rendering engine was introduced recently in our mobile apps, resulting in new versions of both the XForms Mobile app and the XForms Cx mobile app. Latest versions of the mobile apps are as follows:
- XForms Mobile – v 1.1.5
- XForms Cx (commissioning) – v 0.8.13
User-interface (UI) improvements to both mobile apps include the following:
Calculated fields on forms
You can now create numeric expressions on a form, similar to the way you can do this inside tables on a form. The expression engine is the same as that found in the table control, so it’s syntax is the same. Currently, you can do basic math, and also copy a value from a table footer and use it in your expression.
To better explain this, take a look at the screenshot below. In this example, you can see that there are 2 tables displayed:
- One of the tables is a “Charges” table, with a SUM total of $13.00 in charges.
- The other table is a “Payments” table, which shows a cash payment of $4.75.
- And the “Balance” field on the form is a calculated expression taking the SUM total in the “Charges” table and subtracting it from the SUM total in the “Payments” table.
2 columns of fields in portrait mode on tablets
Prior versions of the app running on a tablet would display 2 columns of fields in landscape mode but not when oriented in portrait mode.
That’s now been changed to always displaying 2 columns of fields on tablets regardless of orientation. And when in landscape mode on a high resolution phone, 2 columns of fields will also be displayed.
Force a field to display in full-width
Additional control has been added to the Form Template Designer, so that you can now define a field to render across the entire row, even on tablets that normally render fields in 2 columns.
Both of these features (2 columns and force full-width) are illustrated in the screenshot below.
Multiple tables in the same section
Previous versions of the app had a limitation of adding a single table per form section. That limitation has been removed (thanks to the new form-rendering engine), so now you can add multiple tables in the same section.
This is is illustrated in the screenshot below.
New static text field
A simple static text field type has been added to the Form Template Designer. This new field can be used to display plain text anywhere on a form and is intended as an instructional kind of field, where you can add specific instructions about something in a specific area of a form.
The field understands HTML, so you can add any sort of HTML to the field as well (eg, bold, H1, underline, link, etc)
AVERAGE() function on a table footer
In addition to adding all the values in a numeric table column and displaying that SUM on the table footer, you can now display the average (AVG) of those values in the footer.
To do this, go to the form template designer, edit your table column, and add “=avg” in the footer block, like in the screenshot below.
Replaced the N/A section header checkbox with a down/side carat
The N/A checkbox on a section header that was used to collapse an entire form section has been replaced with a collapse/expand carat. Most importantly, this saves some screen space since it’s not as large vertically, and is more elegant too.
Internally, closing a section still behaves the same as before (ie, required fields in a section that is collapsed will be ignored).
Customized display of info on mobile dashboard
The mobile app dashboard is now configurable with up to 5 rows of information specific to the form data captured. So now you can customize what your users will see on their mobile app dashboard screen.
This feature automatically applies H1 to H4 html tags to the font size, from top to bottom, so that the topmost row of information is displayed in a larger font size relative to the bottom-most row of information.
Sort records based on the columns displayed on the mobile dashboard
Prior versions of the mobile app contained basic sorting, including sort by form name, and sort by date/time (most recent and oldest). Now you can also sort the records on the mobile dashboard by the columns that are also displayed n the mobile dashboard.
This feature is dynamic, so if you change the layout of the customized dashboard, the sort menu will change to reflect the new layout.
More filters to reduce record count on the mobile dashboard
There are now 6 filters instead of 3:
- Today (this is now the default)
- Last 2 days
- Last 7 days
- Last 30 days
- Last 3 months
- All
New scalable lookup field
We’ve added a highly scalable lookup control, which resembles the multichoice field but can look up/search records from thousands of documents. This was added to assist a client with lookups from a recordset in the 40,000+ records range.
New paragraph field
A new text field control has been added that can be used for multiple lines of text, which you can define in the Form Template Designer.
Customizable table button text
The table buttons, which are optional and are used to add a row to a table from the mobile app, can now display whatever text you want them to display.
“Submit” and “Save Draft” buttons have been re-arranged
On older versions of the app, “Save Draft” was at the top of the popup menu, while “Submit” was below it. These positions have been swapped based on user bahavior.
“Clear Offline Data” has been renamed to “Clear Cached Data”
To avoid some confusion, this menu item has been renamed. This is the menu you tap on to clear cached versions of blank form templates so that the system can retrieve a newer version of a form template. Eventually this will be automated.
Checkbox fields can now contain a long description with wrapped text
Prior versions of a checkbox field had some display problems if the description was really long. This has been fixed.
The updates mentioned in this article are all live now in the latest apps available in the app stores.
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