Announcing the new Form Designer: Vellum

Hi Everyone,

I'm pleased to announce that on Friday August 19th we made the new version
of the Form Designer (nicknamed Vellum) available for public use. Vellum
has been in closed testing for the last few weeks and is finally ready to be
tested by our commcare users at large.

You can try it out by navigating to any form you have in your CommcareHQ
domain, going into edit mode and hitting the "Edit in Vellum
(New!)https://www.commcarehq.org/a/scratch/apps/view/2adf37eae309c61bb18913e9661b5afb/modules-0/forms-0/contents/"
link.

Some features in Vellum:

  • Improved tree drag and drop support
  • Faster load times
  • Improved XForm compatibility
  • Better support for question types (including 'secret')
  • Better support for advanced options (such as JR:PreloadParams)
  • A simplified Internationalization interface: All questions are now
    automatically turned into IText. No more worrying about default labels
    versus default Itext labels, itext ID, etc.
  • Validation checking as-you-edit. Vellum will monitor your form as you
    make edits and let you know when you try to do something that will result in
    an invalid form.
  • Excel Itext import and export (highly experimental!)

Upcoming features:

  • Question templates (for when your form makes use of a large number of
    similarly configured questions or common question groupings)
  • A skip logic/constraint wizard.

The old FormDesigner will still be accessible through the usual methods -
for the time being - to allow for an easy migration to the new editor. We
will give plenty of notice before sunsetting the old FormDesigner.

If you have any questions/comments/bug-reports please feel free to let me
know directly via email, or sending a message to
formdesigner-support@dimagi.com

Thanks,
Anton de Winter

ยทยทยท -- Anton de Winter Dimagi Inc (617) 692 0786 529 Main St Charlestown, MA 02129