We're excited to provide details on the first release created as a result of the voting and feedback we received at our inaugural eDesigner Hackathon at the Belfry. It represents the genesis of a shift to democratisation of our product roadmap.
Your input genuinely matters to us and this approach of prioritisation of product development items based upon your votes is one we will, over this year, roll out to all products.
The following content outlines the new functions available in eDesigner and available today.
Your ideas made a reality by the excellent development team at IEG4.
Mobile Responsive Date picker
Now when adding a date field, there is an additional option that enables you to add the option for a user to select a date from a calendar. In line with IEG4's mobile first strategy, this has been designed such that it is responsive and thus works well irrespective of the device.
Choosing to use the calendar picker function or not is simply controlled by the following new option when adding a date:
When this type of control has been added it appears as follows:
Because the date field is populated based upon the user clicking a date this means existing mandatory behaviour works the same way.
Ability to change page order
Previously it could be VERY frustrating if you've built a form and then someone says can you make page 4 page 2. As the only way to have achieved that would be to delete the page and add it in page 2 location and add all of the content again. There is now the ability to simply move designable pages up and down with the Change Page Order function shown in the designer menu here:
And the new screen for changing page order.
It's important to note that this functionality relates specifically to those pages you've added. I.e. not the Tell Us Who You Are/Guidance Notes pages.
Ability to change list order
Like page order, and perhaps more commonly a mistake is made in the order of a list. Before this would have meant doing the list again.
Now you can simply and easily use the up/down arrows (to the right of the list) as shown below to change the order of the items in a list:
You can also delete an individual item and thus correct typos etc. without doing the whole list again!
Mapping list content to OpenProcess Key Information
This is an exciting new feature, as it enables OpenProcess to be more readily used as a case management system.
Up until now it has only been possible to map content from input fields into Key Information. Key information is an additional tab that appears when viewing a process in OpenProcess when data has been mapped from an online form.
Now, we have added the ability to map content from lists i.e. drop downs/radio buttons/checkbox lists directly into OpenProcess. This is shown below and works the same way as other inputs.
Technically meaning that you could map all of the content in a form to Key Information and remove the need for users to access the PDF. Making OpenProcess inherently more accessible to users unfamiliar with it and reduce the number of clicks involved. It's worth noting that this means all inputs including smart ones i.e. dates/NINO/email etc. and lists can now be mapped to OpenProcess.
Bonus Items!
I'd argue these are the best items and I hope you see why.
Date validation - WOO HOO!
eDesigner ensures that when a person adds a date field it is formatted as dd/mm/yyyy, which is good. But this will not stop a person entering the date as 01/01/0001. Because technically this is valid in the context of dd/mm/yyyy.
So, thanks to the dev team, you now have the ability to control what a user can enter in terms of dates. This has TWO new options.
The first is Static date validation.
To provide an example of this let's say you have a date field you want to add where the customer can only choose a date in a given financial year.
In this case today's date is not really relevant, what is though is the date range the customer can enter a date within I.e. for the past financial year the date range would be 01/04/2018 and 31/03/2019. This is how you can do this using the new date validation functionality where the range is static:
The second is the smarter Dynamic date validation
This is the one that will be used A LOT by you. So let's say you want a date field to not allow any dates:
- earlier than 1 month ago from today AND
- not allow dates any further in the future or later than 14 days away from today
The following illustrates how the new dynamic date validation makes this possible:
The drop down in the above which contains the 'Today' value can be changed to be:
- Today
- Yesterday
- Tomorrow
Today is the default as it is most logical and likely to be used. The 'Operator' drop down can contain:
- Plus
- Minus
With the defaults set to minus/plus for earliest/latest respectively as it is most logical.
The time span drop down has options of:
- Days
- Months
- Years
Weekly isn't there as one can, for example, use 21 days for 3 weeks.
Finally, note that it is possible to add validation to the earliest valid date but not the latest valid date and vice versa. And in the same vein you can also say for example:
- Earliest date should be static and no earlier than 01/01/2019
- Latest date should be dynamic and no more in the future than 3 months
New rules engine
This is kind of a big deal...
Previously the functionality for adding/editing rules was not built using the modern user responsive interface. This release changes that AND adds new functionality that makes rule creation and editing much simpler. When you click on page rules now the UI looks like this (v similar to before):
However, now when you click on to a rule there is new and improved functionality. See below:
So the first thing to note is now when you click on a condition instead of:
1) going to a separate screen to select that you want it come from an answer
2) selecting a question
It now instantly shows the choices and question available on the right hand side. This in itself means load times are gone and more importantly to me is that you don't lose context. I.e. "what did I click again?" and need to click in twice again.
Where Jon Barry (name dropped because this is so good!!) has made this even better is now you can see a count beside 'show' and 'hide' so you know at a glance how many questions will be shown / hidden which may even stop you needing to go deeper.
But if you do click on say 'show' this then shows the question(s) that will be be shown if this condition is met:
This functionality makes making very complex rules much quicker as you're to having to go in and out of different screens, you're simply clicking and seeing the behaviour instantly on the right.
This is also true if you click on 'hide' and 'hide page(s)'.
If this wasn't enough we've also added a 'new' function in the rules area which did not exist previously.
Before, you could add a condition which was based upon two conditions both being met. I.e.
IF pet is dog AND IF pet is cat show/hide qs
Now you can use OR conditions as well as AND conditions. I.e.
IF pet is dog OR IF pet is cat show/hide qs
This is shown below:
I think this is a GREAT release and I can tell you that we are now going to be working on the ability to add your own map into eDesigner forms. As soon as I know the delivery date for this I will be in touch.
Release Version Information
2.1.0.0