Improvements to our Form Template Editor

We’ve made some developments across our Form Builders that will help you create and manage your Form Templates. 

Our Form Builders are a powerful tool for gathering employee and applicant information. As a team, we are continuously making improvements that will aid in the usability and reliability of our Forms. 

Limiting when a Field Name can be Edited

We have now disabled the ability to edit Field Names in ANY form (Custom Form, Application Form, and Performance Review Form Builders) if there are responses against the template. As a refresher, Field Names are important in all forms and should be unique within all the fields in the form. 

We improved this for our customers because any changes made to the Form Template AFTER the Form was issued was causing issues. This has been put in place to mitigate potential form data loss across our three form builders. 

It’s important to know that new fields can be added, their Field Name changed, and existing fields can be deleted. We recommend all our customers to read about the Advanced Tips of our Forms, as these additional tips apply to all HR Partner form builders. 

Form Labels and Field Values

We’ve added extra validation to ensure that Form Labels (questions) cannot remain empty. This means that any multi-select options (i.e. radio buttons, checkbox groups, and drop-downs) cannot contain empty field values. There must be contents within a multiple-choice question field. The right-hand column contains some internal identifiers that HR Partner can use to ascertain what data to store against the question. Whereas the left-hand column represents the visual options the recipients see as their options to answer the question. 

As a reminder, contents in the right-hand column cannot have spaces and need to be connected with a dash (-) or an underscore (_). 

Errors No More!

In addition to our developments, we've also improved the reliability of our Form Builders to mitigate errors by doing the following:

Removals for the Large Text Area Field Type

Previously, you may have noticed TinyMCE and Quill format options for large text area field types in our Form Builders. However, we decided to remove the possibilities for TinyMCE and Quill editor layouts on large text areas on custom/performance/application forms as we no longer support those editor plugins. 

Special Characters Roadblocks Now Cleared

We’ve fixed an issue where the symbol for the British Pound symbol and other special character symbols where being improperly stripped from field labels. 

HTML/CSS is Prevented in Some Areas

Finally, we changed where you can use HTML/CSS within the Form Template to limit errors. This change impacts you if you had previously used HTML/CSS in a heading or field label. Allowing HTML/CSS use in both the heading and in the field label was causing issues in other areas of the Form when text was copied from an external source, so we've removed that ability.

This does mean that HTML/CSS customizations that you might have made in previous Form Templates will not work properly. The fix? Go to Forms -> Configure -> Templates and edit the form template, then simply save it again.

The team at HR Partner is excited to put these improvements and solutions in place across our Form Builders to help prevent instances of potential data loss and breaking of forms. We would love to hear your feedback, and please let us know if you stumble upon any issues, or have any questions about Forms.