Question Types
Form Builder allows you to use five types of questions:
A Text Field question is one that will allow the user to enter or select content for a field. There are three possible text field options:
A Simple question, such as the user’s name or date of birth, will have few limitations (such as maximum characters) allowing users to type into the field.
A Formatted question, such as the user's email address, will require that the system validate the user’s response to be in a format like "name@domain.com".
A Lookup type question, such as searching for an ID number or user, would allow the user to search for a particular name and have the corresponding ID saved to the submission.
An Essay question allows you to capture lengthy text responses.
A Drop-down Menu question requires that users must select their response from a list.
You can set up the drop-down menu so that the choices are all hard-coded or so that the choices are determined dynamically. With the dynamic method, the choices might be based on the user’s response to a previous question (which would make it a dependent question) or they might simply be pulled from your database. A drop-down menu’s options might also be dependent upon who the logged-in user is (such as a student or advisor) or the ID for whom the data is being saved (e.g., when an advancement officer is updating information for a constituent).
Multiple Choice questions provide possible answers on the form, then require users to respond by choosing in one of two ways:
Using the Radio Buttons option, users can only select one of the provided answers (such as Yes or No).
Using the Checkboxes option, users can select one or more of the provided answers (for example, check all that apply).
With either type, you can set up the question so that the choices are all hard-coded or so that the choices are determined dynamically. With the dynamic method, the choices might be based on the user’s response to a previous question (which would make it a dependent question) or they may simply be pulled from your database. The multiple choice options might also be dependent upon who the logged-in user is (such as a student or advisor) or the ID for whom the data is being saved (e.g., when an advancement officer is updating information for a constituent).
File Upload questions allow the submitter to upload one or more files to JICS for later review as well as download any files defined for the question.
The question can be defined to display selected template files and determine the number of allowed, pre-defined files the submitter can upload.
Tip
The File Upload question type is only available to the Student Forms feature.
Uploaded files are not transferred to the J1 database upon submission but must be viewed through the Student Forms feature's reviewing functionality; therefore, you should not map a File Upload question. However, if you do map a File Upload question to a mapping column, the mapping column value will simply be a text string saying, See file(s) in JICS interface.
