Understanding generic forms
The ability to create any type of custom form is a very powerful feature within Civica Cx Housing, offering the potential to gather information on literally any housing-related topic, whether that is to, say, record the findings of a tenancy inspection, capture bank details in preparation for a new Direct Debit instruction, or the creation of enquiry and application forms to manage the housing stock and service allocation procedures. Their complexity can vary greatly, depending on local requirements, ranging from a very basic set of self-contained entry fields, right through to numerous inter-dependent form elements seeking to capture a wealth of data that can then inform other activities. In addition to user-defined fields, system elements pertaining to contacts, assets and other focus areas - indeed any standard data field - are also freely available for inclusion.
Each generic form begins with a blank template, onto which field elements of all supported response types - text, integer, decimal, date and time, check boxes, etc. - can be inserted, with particular attention being given to appearance, flow and content. Whilst it is prudent to get the structure right from the start, these components can be repositioned easily using familiar 'drag and drop' functionality. Rules can also be defined to control the precise behaviour and flow of a generic form, governing when specific fields should appear based on responses to previous elements, as well as the mandatory status of those fields and how that is managed in relation to earlier responses.
In order to provide the widest flexibility in implementing the use of custom forms throughout an organisation, a PDF download feature is also available, which can generate either a blank copy of a specific form - preserving the format, layout and custom styling - or replicate a particular variant, retaining all completed data entry values. Furthermore, once all mandatory fields contained on a generic form have been completed and the finalised document submitted, configuration properties ascribed to the underlying form template will afford the opportunity to transfer a PDF copy automatically to an incumbent Electronic Document Management (EDM) system.
See related topics...
To define a generic form status code