Forms

Overview¶

With forms and fields, you can make advanced customizations of your model in great detail. Many forms and fields are designed to be reused in similar contexts. For instance "publisher" is a field for dcterms:publisher and "Document" is the form for foaf:Document.

The main work flow is to create a form, then create the fields you want to have in the form and finally add the fields to the form. Below is a preview of a form with different fields.

Click on Form and choose to either create a form from scratch or extend an already existing form with the buttons "Extend" and "Create".

Create form¶

Click on "Create" to start creating a new form and then choose which Form type you want your form to be:

Profile form - A standard web form containing fields.
Section form - A subform displayed as a separate section within another form.
Object form - A supporting form to a profile form, dependent on a property. (Object forms can't be used as stand-alone forms.)

You can also add a Purpose to your form. Click on "Create" to save your new form.

Extend form¶

To adapt or enhance an already existing form, you can click on "Extend" and choose another form to start from. Note that extending another form does not create a copy of other form, but rather a reference to that form with or without its fields.

In the next dialog, you get to specify a name and select which form you want to extend, as well as whether you want to include the fields (Copy and override) from the source form or just copy the form without the fields.

Use the filter or search function to find the form you want to extend.

Once you have extended your form, you can change and adapt it they way you want. Editing existing field data will override the existing data from the original form. Adding new data in empty fields enriches your form, but keep in mind that your new form will be dependent on your source form and you should avoid changing core elements such as namespaces, domains or ranges.

Edit form¶

If you click on the form title you see the detailed overview of the form and can enter more information by clicking on the different edit buttons to the right.

Click on "Edit" if you want to change the metadata for your form.

Click on "Edit attributes" if you want to change the behaviour and appearance of the form.

Click on "Change type" if you want to change form type (Profile form, Object form, Section form). Note that changing form type might lead to losing non supported properties.

Click on "Form items" if you want to add or remove fields to your form.

Edit form metadata¶

Click on the "Edit" button to edit metadata for the form.

Status:

Unstable - May change at any time (also default value)
Stable - Finished, no changes expected
Depracated - Outdated/replaced

RDF shape

Node type - States if the form corresponds to a URI, Blank or Resource
Cardinality - If the form is Mandatory, Recommended or Optional
Max - Max number of subforms of the specific form type
Constraint - Here you can either select a class or choose a more advanced approach with constraining properties as well as constraining objects. Constraining for a certain value for the RDF type.

Presenters and Editors

Presenters and Editors can either see the same information, or can be shown different labels and descriptions. (The default is to show the presenter label and description for both user groups.)

Presenter:

Label
Description

Editor:

Edit label
Edit description

Lastly, you can add CSS classes to your form, such as card-group (predefined from RDForms) or your own CSS classes.

Edit attributes¶

You can change the behaviour and appearance of your form by clicking on the button "Edit attributes".

Change form type¶

You can change form type for your form, but remember that elements that belonged to the old type but is unsupported in the new type will be lost irreversably.

Manage fields in form¶

You can manage fields in your form by clicking on the button "Form items".

Add field¶

To add fields to your form, click on the Plus button to get a list to choose from.

You can select the fields you want to add to your form from the list. It's also possible to search for form item titles as well as use the filter function to be able to use e.g. fields from another model, of a specific status and type, such as text fields.