Changing and Updating Forms
When you assign a form to a child, it is different than printing off a piece of paper and handing it to their parents (the way it is for conference reports). Forms behave differently from conference reports, which gives you special advantages and also can lead to unintended side-effects. A form is composed of form items (including inputs such as multiple choice questions or fields such as child name) that can behave in unintuitive ways when you edit them. In this article, we'll look at how you can modify forms while avoiding unintended consequences when:
- Changing a form item's title for small corrections and typos
- Changing a form item's title to mean something different
- Changing the values of multiple-choice, drop-down, and checkbox questions
- Deleting a form item
Changing a Form Item's Title - Typos and Small Corrections
When you update your form template, the changes are reflected in the assigned form. This "live updating" behavior is useful because it makes it easy to tweak titles of your form items and it will be updated for all the assigned forms.
When you change the title of a form item that will impact existing forms, it will warn you.
Changing a Form Item's Title - Major Changes
Be careful when changing a form item's title to mean something entirely different. If you're changing a title from "I would like my child to be enrolled in 2018-19" to "I would like my child to be enrolled in 20 19-20", that changes the meaning of the question, and it will be reflected in forms already assigned to parents. Changes like these can make it unintentionally look like the parent agreed to something they did not.
If you want to substantially change a title's meaning, you have some options:
- Copy the existing widget and change the title,
- Add a brand new widget, or
- Create a new form template.
Option 3 is often ideal when your form template is specific to a year, e.g. "Parent Contract 2018-19", "Parent Contract 2019-20".
Changing the Values of a Multiple-Choice, Drop-down, Etc.
When the values of a multiple-choice, checkboxes, or drop-down form item are changed, this impacts forms that have already been assigned. If the parent's original choice is no longer reflected in the list of options, it will still display in their submitted or accepted forms as another option in the list. For example, if the original question of "Favorite color" had red, blue, and green as options, and then "red" was removed from the list, a parent who had chosen "red" originally will still see it shown in their form.
If the form is in a requested state or is changed back to a requested state, the parent will be warned that their previous choice is no longer an option.
Deleting a Form Item
When you delete a form item, it will no longer be displayed normally in forms assigned to parents. The data is not entirely lost, however, and we show a raw version of it in forms that have been submitted or requested.
Clicking on "Show" will reveal the responses to questions that no longer exist in the form.
Note that the formatting on the responses to old questions might look strange, because we're storing raw data; we no longer know how the data was supposed to be displayed, that's the job of the form item which no longer exists.
Questions?
You can always contact us using the orange speech bubble button in the lower right > [Ask] or email us directly at info@transparentclassroom.com.