Understanding and Using Active Forms

Overview

When completing a workflow step, there's often information encountered that needs to find a home in your organization. With Active Forms in your Practifi instance, you can enter that information directly on the workflow step's record page. This article outlines what Active Forms are and how to access this functionality within your organization. For System Administrator information about Active Forms, please consult our Configuring Active Forms article.

• Understanding Active Forms
• Using and Accessing Active Forms
• Tips for Filling Out Active Forms

Understanding Active Forms

Active Forms are configured by System Administrators in your Practifi instance. Using Active Forms avoids additional navigation and ensures that team members capture what's needed before marking an item as complete. Once captured, that information gets used as inputs by the workflow step's actions, sending it to exactly where it needs to go in your organization.

Active Forms are supported on single-step workflows, such as a templated task, or available as part of multi-step workflows, such as a process. If a task does not have an Active Form attached to it by a System Administrator, a message will display informing the user that there is no associated Active Form. 

During the creation process of the Active Form, the System Administrator will verify the functionality of their Active Form with a Validation Check. This feature checks 14 scenarios to ensure the Active Form is working as the Administrator expects. It is possible for a user to see an Active Form that has failed the Validation Check. If issues raised during the check cause problems when team members complete the workflow step, they'll receive a prompt explaining this to them. If this prompt displays, the user should reach out to their Practifi System Administrator to have them confirm the workflow's settings.

Using and Accessing Active Forms

If a workflow step has a form associated with it, users will see it in the Active Form tab on the Task record page. The form also appears when a user marks the task as complete, ensuring that the data capture requirements are addressed before the step is completed.

The user the task is assigned to can edit the created Active Form. All other users within the Practifi instance will see a read-only version of the form. Practifi System Administrators are the exception and can edit the Active Form regardless of whether they are assigned the task. 

Every time a user navigates away from an Active Form field in the system, the contents entered into the field are saved automatically. This automatic save feature ensures the data captured in the form is not lost. 

The Practifi System Administrator may configure fields to be set as required within the Active Form. Required fields must contain a value before a task can be marked as complete, but this only applies to the fields that are relevant based on the outcome selected; other fields are hidden. For example, if a user is assigned a task to book an appointment and they select an outcome of Unable to Contact Client, then any required fields for creating an Event record to represent the appointment won’t be visible in the Active Form as it appears in the Mark as Complete action.

Within the Active Form, users have the ability to enter information into text fields and long text fields. Text fields can hold up to 255 characters, and long text fields can hold up to 131,072 characters.  

After a task is completed, the Active Form will still appear on the page, but it will be archived in read-only mode. Users can still view the Active Form's contents and reference information for compliance purposes. 

Tips for Filling Out Active Forms

For the best user experience, we recommend the following best practices when working with Active Forms:

• While Active Forms are available within the Mark As Complete workflow, completing Active Form fields within the Tasks - Basics page makes fields with conditional rendering load faster. We recommend all users complete Active Form fields within the Tasks - Basics page. The Mark as Complete screen can be used to confirm entries and make minor changes rather than completing the whole Active Form.

• When completing an Active Form field, be sure that you have either tabbed to the next field or clicked away from the field. Otherwise, the next field will not be activated, loaded, rendered or saved.