wiki : Technical documentation > Create forms (Forms plugin)
Creating forms with the Forms plugin
The Lutece “Forms” plugin has been developed by the IT department of the City of Paris (Direction des Systèmes d'Information et du Numérique - DSIN) to provide departments with a toolbox for generating forms. This plugin is also part of the software base offered as a service: CiteLibre Service'EZ.
It helps build online forms by creating steps and adding fields such as text, dates, sortable or drop-down lists, checkboxes or radio buttons, telephone numbers... These fields can be configured using a wide range of options: conditional steps, conditional display, field control, validation rules, anonymization, etc.
All submissions are managed in the back office. It is based on the use of workflow-related plug-ins, enabling automated or manual processes to be defined for processing data entered in forms. It is possible to configure: email or SMS notifications of the progress of a request, assignment of responses to an entity, requests for additional information or correction of data input, etc.
The “Forms” plugin also offers a wide range of features, such as theme integration, authentication to a secure user relations system, integration of user request processing on a dashboard, data export, statistics tables, etc.
Presentation of the plugin
This plugin provides complete and flexible management of forms within a Lutece site via the following actions:
- Creating, editing, duplicating and deleting a form,
- Managing the form's publication and opening period
- Previewing the form before publication and using a test mode
- Instructing responses or submissions
- Managing the different steps and their organization in the form
- Publishing form data in front-office as a list or map.
The "Forms" plugin can be associated :
- with the plugin "Workflow" and with the module "Workflow-forms" for a finer instruction of the requests
- with the plugin "Unittree" to assign the instruction of the requests according to the organization of the instructing service
Forms offers two classic interfaces of Web services:
- A Front Office corresponding to the published forms, dedicated to users so that they can file their request
- A Back Office dedicated to the instructing department to process and respond to requests. From this interface, forms are created by functional administrators, who can access other complementary tools (dashboard, workflow plugin, unittree).
Further information
Developments for Forms
The Forms plugin is available on Github, under BSD 3 license and is therefore modifiable and reusable. It is possible to implement new features in this plugin.
You can also link the Forms plugin to the following components to add further functionality:
| Plugins/Modules | Feature |
|---|---|
| module-forms-unitree | Allows you to assign responses made to a form to entities (groups of users) defined by the unittree plugin, based on the value of the response to a question. |
| module-forms-userassignment | Similar to module-forms-unitree except that instead of assigning form responses to an entity, it assigns them to a Lutece user/working group. |
| module-workflow-forms-automatic-assignment | Similar to module-forms-userassignment but the assignment is automatic. |
| module-workflow-forms | Allows you to associate a workflow with a form and define generic tasks for it (e.g. an archiving task: anonymize or delete form responses after X days). |