Forms Overview

This topic provides an overview of the Nintex Forms features, functions, structure, and how to modify Forms to meet the requirements of your solution.

This topic looks at:

Introducing Nintex Forms

Nintex Forms are a Microsoft SharePoint tool primarily used for collecting and validating user input into SharePoint lists and Nintex Workflows. The Software Development Kit (SDK) will look at the purpose of the forms, how forms are designed, stored, and rendered in SharePoint. The documentation will also address the underlying file format used by Nintex forms, and finally how to use the Application Programmable Interface (API) to manage your forms and integrate them into your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) as you develop solutions for Nintex Forms and Workflows.

A common use of a digital form is to replace paper-based data collection. Digital forms provide several benefits. A digital forms doesn't have to be printed. When a form user accesses the form they are always accessing the most recent version. Furthermore. the form can capture information directly from the form user rather than requiring data entry staff to key handwritten forms. The form user inserts the information into a SharePoint 2013 list. Form validation improves the quality of the data by providing the form user with feedback. NintexForms provides tools to help the form user enter accurate information such as list controls, data lookups, and validation rules. In addition, you can provide forms optimized for mobile users interacting with the form on a variety of devices: tablets, smart phones, and laptops.

Nintex Forms also support interactivity with presentation logic that can greatly improve the experience (and therefore quality of data provided by) your form users. Although you can see great benefit from just moving your paper-based forms to Nintex Forms, Nintex provides tools to help focus data entry elements, connect data sources, and dynamically display form controls to help your form user provide data.

For more information, see How Nintex Forms work.

Overview of Nintex Forms

NintexForms is composed of several areas.

The Forms Designer

Starting with automatically-generated forms, users can quickly customize the look and feel of their applications through a browser-based designer and then leverage a rules engine to enforce presentation logic. A drag and drop, browser-based SharePoint Forms designer for browsers, smartphones and tablets. Nintex Forms are SharePoint-native, mobile-enabled, workflow-aware and cloud-ready.

For more information see Workflow and Forms Dataflow.

The Forms Filler

The Forms filler renders the form within the context of SharePoint. For example, when a user opens a SharePoint list, a form can be triggered to open. The Forms filler reads the form XML and interacts with SharePoint to connect the user interaction, event model, and data with the list.

For more information see Forms Filler.

Nintex Forms Description (Form XML)

The XML file contains descriptions of the layout, forms controls, CSS, rules, other elements of the form in a portable format. You can use form XML to migrate from one SharePoint instance to another.

For more information see Form XML Overview.

Form API

The API allows you to export, import, save, publish, and delete form XML from SharePoint 2013 On Premises. This can help form's designers and developers deploy forms in the software development life cycle (from a development environment to a test environment and then to production), or third-party solution providers develop a form in their development environment and then deploy the form to a client.

For more information see Web Service Reference.

PowerShell Cmdlets

Nintex provides PowerShell extension that can also help with managing and deploying the forms.

For more information see PowerShell Reference.

Extending and modifying Nintex Forms

Forms can be modified or extended in several ways:

JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets

With JavaScript support, you can add code snippets that can provide inline functions, calculations, formatting rules, validation rules, and custom control interaction. In addition, you can change the look, feel, and some of the behavior of the form using cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript.

Managed Code

Using Visual Studio and Nintex Forms classes, you can develop and deploy a managed code solution to SharePoint as a .wsp file that will allow you to add custom bindable controls to the Forms designer and to the desktop layout of your form.

For information on creating a managed code solution to create custom controls see Create a custom form control sample.

Managing Nintex Forms

When you have a number of Nintex Forms in your enterprise, you will begin to want to perform management and maintenance tasks on your forms. Nintex provides you the tools to do these tasks as well. For instance, you may need to archive forms, migrate forms from one SharePoint instance to another, or you may need to make bulk updates to forms.

To accomplish these management tasks Nintex provides:

Nintex Forms and InfoPath

In January 2014, Microsoft announced that they ending the development of InfoPath and SharePoint forms. InfoPath provided a drag and drop tool for creating richly interactive XML-based forms for SharePoint. NintexForms can provides many of the features found in InfoPath and will continue to be developed to change to take advantage of the continually evolving SharePoint platform and emerging cloud platforms.

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