Using the Intake Form Designer

This topic describes the purpose of the Intake Form Designer, lists the prerequisites that must be completed prior to creating a form, and introduces you to the designer interface.

To initiate a transaction, such as a permit, an intake form needs to be submitted to capture the information required for that process. Examples of transactions include permit applications, planning and zoning applications, and so on. You use the Intake Form Designer to create application forms that public users can access online, fill out, submit, and monitor.

Oracle does not deliver a predefined form for each type of transaction because for each form and for each municipality, the information required will be unique. For example, for a fence permit, the City of San Diego may require only basic information about the material to be used and the measurements. On the other hand, the City of Sacramento may require the same information as San Diego, but also require the contact information of the contractor building the fence, the exact location of the fence, the area enclosed by the fence, and so on. Each municipality has its own set of requirements, and the Intake Form Designer enables you to tailor the forms to reflect your agency's requirements.

With the Intake Form Designer, you can create unique application forms for each transaction type offered. The Intake Form Designer provides modular sets of common fields, called predefined field groups, which are ready-to-use form elements you can assemble like building blocks to create the intake form. If a predefined field group does not contain all the fields you require, you can add user-defined fields to capture the additional information.

The type of intake form you create depends on the offering.

Public Sector Compliance and Regulation Offering	Intake Form Types
Permits	Permit applications
Planning and Zoning	Planning pre-application Planning application
Code Enforcement	Report an issue
Business Licenses	Business license: Consultation Origination Amendment Renewal Note: For business licenses, typically the consultation activity uses a separate intake form. You can use a single form design to address origination, amendment, and renewal license activity.

Once you have created, configured, and tested your form, you can publish the form for public users to access, complete, and submit for review and approval.

Note: For simplicity in this documentation, the Intake Form Designer is often referred to as “the designer,” and an intake form is often referred to as a “form.”

Completing Prerequisites

Before creating a form, you need to:

• Create a transaction type.

  A transaction type represents the type of intake form you will create such as a permit application, a business license application, and so on.

  For more information on creating a transaction type, see Setting Up Permit Types, Setting Up Business License Types, Setting Up Planning Application Types, Setting Up Issue Types.

• Set up any fees associated with the form.

  For more information on fees, see Setting Up Fee Itemsand Setting Up Fee Schedules.

• Set up workflow for the transaction.

  For more information on workflow, see Setting Up Process Definitions for Workflow.

Accessing the Designer

Before you can create an application form, you must first create a transaction type on the Transaction Type page.

From the Transaction Type page for the appropriate offering, select the Design Form button.

Working with the Designer Interface

Note: While the Intake Form Designer interface is practically identical for all offerings, using the designer for Code Enforcement uses only a subset of the designer’s features. For more information on using the designer to create intake forms for Code Enforcement, see Using the Intake Form Designer for Code Enforcement.

Page Element	Description
Status	Indicates the status of the current design. Draft: the form is in sandbox mode, and currently being designed and tested. Published: the form design is complete and it no longer needs to be in sandbox mode. A published form can be migrated to other environments. For more information on form status, see Working with Sandboxes and Publishing Intake Forms.
Add Logic	Enables you to add programming logic scripts using the Groovy programming language. For more information on Groovy, see Adding Logic.
View Form	Enables you to select options for viewing and testing the form design from the Intake Form Designer. Select View Form to access your form for testing the current layout and behavior as it would appear at runtime. For more information on testing forms, see Testing Intake Forms. Select Fee Estimate to view the intake form as if a user were requesting a fee estimate for the current intake form. For more information on end users requesting fees, see Getting an Online Fee Estimate and Estimating Fees.
Save	Saves changes made to the form design.
Manage Design	Enables you to access various tasks for the intake form related to reordering form elements, managing the sandbox, exporting forms, and publishing forms. For more information on sandboxes, see Working with Sandboxes. For more information on publishing, see Publishing Intake Forms. For more information on reordering form layouts, see Reorder Intake Form Elements. For more information on exporting and importing forms, see Exporting and Importing Intake Forms. For more information on working with intake form versions, see Creating Intake Form Versions.
Next	Takes you to the Fee Mapping page, which is the next step in the form design process. If the transaction type is not associated with a fee schedule, the Fee Mapping page is not displayed. For more information on mapping fees, see Mapping Form Fields to Decision Model Attributes.
Form Options	Click to display the Form Options dialog box where you can set options that apply to the entire form. For more information on form options, see Setting Form Options.
Elements panel	The Elements panel contains all of the items that you use to build an intake form. It displays lists of all pre-defined field groups and user-defined elements you can add to your form design by dragging and dropping. The Ready to Use section contains: Field Groups: predefined sets of fields. Fields: user-defined fields you have created and set to be reusable fields, which can be defined once and included in multiple intake forms. The Add New section contains: General: the list of all the field types for user-defined fields you add manually to intake forms. Layout: HTML constructs, such as group box containers, that you add to your intake forms. For more information see, Working with Predefined Field Groups, Working with Pages, and Working with Fields.
Add Tab	Adds additional pages to your form. You navigate between the pages by using the page tab for each page. For more information, see Working with Pages.
Workspace	The area where you drag and drop form elements from the Elements panel and configure them. This is the main work area used for creating, configuring, and designing the layout out your forms.
Attributes panel	Displays the available attributes that you can configure for the currently selected form element. For example, if you have a field selected, the attributes panel reads "Field Attributes,” and it contains attributes specific to that field type. If you have a group box selected, the attributes panel reads "Group Box Attributes,” and it contains attributes specific to group boxes.

Using the Keyboard to Drag and Drop Elements

You can drag and drop form elements manually using your mouse, or you can use keyboard hot keys.

Key	Description
Enter	Use to: Expand or collapse the Ready to Use or Add New element lists. Drop a selected element onto the selected drop zone
Tab	Use the tab key to select either the first element in the list or the last selected item in the list if a previous visit was made to the list.
Up and Down Arrows	Use to: Select an item in the Ready to Use or Add New element lists. Select a location from the drop zone list. The selected drop zone is highlighted.
Space	When an element is selected, the space key highlights the selected element and displays available drop zones for the current page on the Select a Drop Zone dialog box. The drop zones can be the page or group boxes contained by the page. For user-defined fields, the drop zones are group boxes.

Organizing the Tasks for Creating Forms

This section provides the core set of tasks to complete when creating an intake form. The remaining topics in this chapter discuss the details of each task.

Step	Link
Add page tabs.	Working with Pages
Add predefined field groups.	Working with Predefined Field Groups
Modify field attributes in predefined field groups.	Working with Fields
Add group boxes.	Working with Group Boxes
Add user-defined fields.	Working with Fields
Testing intake forms.	Testing Intake Forms
Publishing intake forms.	Publishing Intake Forms