Form Basics

In Landscape, a Form is a way to ask questions, usually within a Stewardship Site site visit, but also within Property Assets (Approvals, Baseline Reports, Site Visits, and generic Property Assets like Recorded Documents can all have forms).  A completed form can then be merged along with other data into a report.

Form Templates for forms that are intended to be used multiple times are built from the Settings --> Work section. Forms that will only be used once can be built in individual Stewardship Sites or assets.

How Forms are used with Reports in Landscape:

Building a new Form

The form builder is located in Settings --> Work --> Forms:

"Forms" is where you build your form templates. Click on the plus button to create a new one, or click on any of the form entries to begin editing a template.  If you'd like to create a copy of or delete an existing form template, use the check box and select either the copy or delete button:

Form Sections are where you can create section headers that can then be filtered out by the report builder.  For example,  if you have 'Landowner Questions', 'Site Assessment', and 'Follow-up' sections, and you want to prevent the 'Follow-up' section from being brought into the report, you can do so.  Or perhaps you collect specific metrics in a certain part of the report and want to merge data from multiple field visits, but only from that metrics section.  You could use the report builder to only merge the data from the 'Metrics' section of the form.

Click on the '+' button to add a new section. Selecting the star makes that section type the default option chosen by the report builder.  To delete a section, select it with the check box and click on the trash can icon.  This will not delete the section from existing forms that it has already been used in, it will only eliminate it from the list of available choices in the future.

Any content below a form section in the form template is considered to be in that section.

To build a new form, click the (+) button next to 'Forms'. You'll be taken into the form builder:

Give your form a name, and choose whether you want the questions to be auto-numbered.  Then click 'Add Question' to add a new question.

Enter the question text first where it says 'Enter question or explanatory text', then choose the type of question by clicking where it says 'SHORT ANSWER'. Note that the available choices are 'Short Answer', 'Number', 'Multiple Choice', 'Multiple Choice with Explanation', 'Pick from List', 'Pick from List with Explanation', 'Explanatory Text', and 'Section Header' (note that there are buttons for adding explanatory text and section headers as well).

Here's what adding a question looks like:

'...with Explanation' means that you will be given the option of adding helper text to the question, such as: 'if the answer is 'Yes', explain', or 'enter the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit'.

Repeat this process to build your complete form.  If you want to reorder the questions, you can drag a question to a new location by clicking and dragging the two small horizontal lines at the bottom of the question.

There are a few options that you can toggle on and off for each question. Click on the three dots to the left of the question to see them:

'Show Description' makes a question description field available.  'Question is Sensitive' allows a question to be filtered out of a form block in the final report, as long as that option is also toggled on in the report template.  

To delete a question, click on the three dots and select 'Delete'.

Question History and Editing Forms

While filling out a form in a Site Visit or asset, users have access to the question response history by clicking on the clock button in the lower right corner:

This function of the software works because Landscape assigns each question an ID number that is invisible to the user. However, what this means is that if you or another user deletes the question text and replaces it with something else, the history function will not work as intended, as Landscape cannot 'tell' that the question has changed. It is important therefore that if you are editing a form template that has been in use for a while, you fully delete questions that you are changing and do not simply change the text. If re-ordering a form, do so by dragging and dropping the questions and not by changing the text of the questions.

Read about how forms are brought into reports by reviewing the 'form blocks' section in this article.