What is a BlinkForm?
- Ray Pearce (Unlicensed)
Often, the mobile Interactions you wish to deliver to your users require integration with existing forms-based systems. You might also wish to deploy new mobile forms and data capture capabilities within your answerSpace.
The BlinkForms Builder provides the ability to create mobile forms that can be used in an answerSpace for immediate use.
Using the BlinkForms Buiilder to create and distribute Forms is a simple process:
- Use the BlinkForms Builder to provide a rapid-build and prototyping environment. The BlinkForms Builder lets non-programmers develop Forms in collaboration with your actual users, instantly creating fully-functional prototypes which write and retrieve data, to and from the test database (called the BlinkNow Database).
- Once the Form has been tested and reviewed, then you or your IT staff can fully integrate the forms into your back-end systems.
BlinkForms provides automatic PDF generation and emailing/SMS/workflow integration which can be specified when you are designing your Forms. Direct camera and gallery integration into Forms, signature panes and offline/ disconnected-mode are all part and parcel of the BlinkForms package.
There are huge productivity gains by using BlinkForms together with database interrogation and forms submission, and this course will introduce you to the basics of blinkForms functionality.
The Anatomy of a Form
When a Form loads, you can think of it as a page. All the necessary scripts required to run the Form's Interactions, or manipulate data are loaded first, into what you can think of as the <head> part of the page. Then comes the elements and what type they are, as well as what kind of data they must contain. Lastly, the footer section has any final formatting that is unique to that particular form.
What Do BlinkForms Do?
BlinkForms allow you to generate a number of Interactions which can retrieve or submit data which has been input by the user. They can be integrated into your back-end business systems to capture user input and store it securely. Conversely, BlinkForms can pull data from your systems and display them to your users on their devices.
Most importantly, BlinkForms function primarily on your user's mobile device, only connecting to servers when required or when they are available. if a user is in a location where they cannot connect to the Internet, the form data is stored on the device in a 'Pending Queue' - ready to be submitted once the user can get online.
When a Form loads, a number of processes happen before you actually see the form in your answerSpace:
