Types of Forms - Documentation for Ar System 21.02

An administrator can create forms that serve as part of a unique workflow solution. Form types include the following:

• Regular forms
• Join forms
• Display-only form
• View and Vendor forms
• Inline forms

These forms can be customized using form views, as explained in Defining and managing form views.

Regular forms

Regular forms are generally the main forms of your applications. Within the AR System server  database, AR System  builds and manages tables to store the data displayed on your forms. When you create a regular form, you see the eight core fields (see the following figure). All regular forms contain these fields. For information about core fields, see Core fields. 

Join forms

Join forms are composite forms that consist of fields derived from other existing forms. A join form can be useful in the following situations:

• When you need to produce reports from data that exists in more than one form.
• When data is stored in multiple forms and you want to display the data in a single form.
• To eliminate the need to enter the same data into multiple forms.

A join form in AR System  is similar to joining tables in a relational database. A join form uses searches to combine fields from two forms based on join criteria (see Join forms). The data in a join form comes from the database tables of the forms that make up the join form.

When you create a Join form you can define fields from both forms that are being joined. You cannot use keywords in a Join form condition. You can use fields or static values to define Join form conditions.

After the join form is created, it behaves similarly to non-join forms. Users can submit data for creation or modification, report from it, select entries from it, use it in workflow requests, define workflow on it, and so on. From the user's perspective, there is no difference between join and non-join forms.