Do you ever wonder in a form why you see a field for spouse name when the marital status you specified is single, or get validation errors only at the end when submitting a form, or having to manually compute your total family income? Shouldn’t the form be intelligent enough to figure out these things based on your inputs?
One of the key performance indicators of any digital form transaction is its conversion rate, which corresponds to the rate of form submissions. Intelligent and simplified form filling experiences, among other factors, significantly contribute to increased customer satisfaction and higher conversions. As forms technologies are evolving, customers expect faster turnaround time when filling forms. On the other hand, organizations strive for greater accuracy and check for business validations when capturing data.
Creating dynamic forms with business logic and that adapt to user inputs is a step in the direction that can help businesses optimize their form filling experiences and meet conversion goals.
Adobe Experience Manager 6.1 forms feature pack 1 introduces rule editor that empowers both business users and developers to build complex logic as rules in adaptive forms. These rules are defined to trigger actions on form objects and the form itself by evaluating conditions based on user inputs. The rules make adaptive forms dynamic resulting in simplified and enhanced form filling experiences.
Interesting enough? Let’s dig a little in to the salient features of AEM forms rule editor.
Variety of actions to make forms truly dynamic
In rule editor, you can write rules to dynamically perform various actions on form objects and the form, including:
- Show or hide objects.
- Enable or disable objects.
- Set value of objects and object properties.
- Invokes a web service to perform an operation.
- Clear the value of an object.
- Set focus to an object.
- Save, submit, reset, and validate the form.
- Add or remove instances of repeatable panel and table row.
In addition, you can write complex rules that include multiple condition and action statements using AND or OR operators. You can also use built-in functions and write mathematical expressions in rules to compute values and assign them to form objects.
Intuitive user interface to write rules effortlessly
Rule editor is for everyone, whether you are a business user or a developer. It provides two modes — visual editor and code editor — to help you create rules.
AEM froms visual editor
The visual editor mode of rule editor empowers business users to write rules themselves. It reduces their dependency on developers to write code for them to add dynamic behavior to forms. The visual editor is simple yet powerful interface that allows business users to simply drag-drop form objects and select operators to quickly write complex rules. In addition, rule editor automatically generates JavaScript code for rules written in the visual editor. You can switch from visual to code editor to view the generated code.
The following displays a rule in the visual editor to show the Spouse Salary field only when the value specified in the Marital Status field is Married.
AEM forms code editor
Developers who are proficient and comfortable with writing JavaScript code can take advantage of the code editor mode to write rules. In this mode, you can write new rules or modify existing rules in the code editor.
The following shows the auto-generated code for the rule created in visual editor shown above.
Easy management of rules to bring peace of mind
Rule editor provides an interface where you can view rules and perform actions like create new rules and view, sort, delete, and edit existing rules.
Backward compatibility to preserve your existing scripts
If you are an existing AEM forms customer and planning to upgrade to AEM 6.1 forms feature pack 1, you must be wondering what will happen to your existing scripts post upgrade. Well, there is good news!
All scripts created in existing AEM forms version will be retained in the new rule editor when you upgrade. You can view and modify them in the code editor. Note that the Scripts tab you see in previous versions is replaced by the AEM forms rule editor in feature pack 1.
I hope you are enthused by now to lay your hand on the cool new rule editor and geared up to create dynamic and delightful experiences for your form users. To get started with using rule editor, see Using Rule Editor Help.
Here’s wishing your customers a delightful form filling experience!