How to use the user experience of IBM forms-rich ICM products

Introduction to IBM Forms and introduction to Features

IBM Lotus Forms is an open standard spreadsheet software that helps you quickly consolidate data with existing IT systems and extend business processes to your customers through Easy-to-use, web-based tables. Forms are important components in many business processes. Forms form an interface for providing critical information, including requests, approvals, who, what, how many, when, and so on. The form can significantly affect the efficiency of the process, which in turn affects the fluency of the entire business operation.

IBM Form main products include IBM Forms Designer, IBM forms VIEWER,IBM forms Server. By using these tools you can create and display your form. By integrating with the background process program, the form can be designed to participate in the operation of the business process, complete end-to-end solution. The following is a brief introduction to the three tools:

The IBM forms Designer is an eclipse-based graphical interface designed to design XFDL forms. You can easily drag a form component from the artboard to canvas to design a form that meets your business needs. The forms that are designed are based on an XML data parsing model that can be seamlessly integrated with other business applications or information facilities.

IBM Forms Viewer features a rich desktop application that fully supports the XFDL language. You can view, fill out, sign, and submit the form. Its functionality can be presented through a desktop application and can be invoked through a browser.

IBM forms Server provides most of the forms Viewer functionality. It works by converting XFDL into a set of Html,javascript,ajax calls. By interacting with an HTML page, the user can transfer the corresponding return value back to the server-side XFDL document. Provides users with a quick, efficient way to process a form without downloading any forms or plug-ins on the client.

IBM Forms Main Features

Speaking of the features of IBM Forms, it also needs to be analyzed from its structure. The following is a structural analysis diagram of IBM Forms:

Figure 1. Form structure

IBM Forms is based primarily on two technical standards: XFDL and XForms. XFDL has a wealth of user controls to improve the user experience, and XForms focuses not only on the user experience, but also on business logic, making system integration easier. The combination of these two technologies has also enabled IBM Forms to become very powerful. Here are some of the main features of IBM Forms:

Converting forms through PDF

With IBM forms Designer, you can easily convert a PDF form directly into an IBM forms form, and edit the converted form two times. With this feature, IBM forms can help users to simply electronically document some paper files, save time on form design, and improve productivity. This feature is also very simple to use, open the IBM Form Designer, using the embedded conversion tool can be converted.

Pre-conversion PDF file:

Figure 2. Convert Pre PDF

Converted IBM Forms type files:

Figure 3. Screenshot after converted File

As you can see from the illustration above, forms converted from PDF documents have converted basic form items into form controls used by IBM forms. Designers only need to make a slight adjustment and edit in the Designer can be used directly, to the designers save a lot of time for the form design. In addition to converting PDF files, this conversion tool can also convert an electronic form of an IBM FileNet P8 eforms type. There are not many introductions here.

XFDL calculation

IBM forms is also very rich in computing, and these rich computing features enable users to design forms that are more flexible and intelligent. Unlike other programming languages, XFDL is calculated based on events. triggered when the value of an option changes or when it is detected based on an event calculation. XFDL's calculation types include mathematical and conditional calculations, and all calculations can be performed through the user interface, while IBM Form Designer supports code view, and users can edit them by adding code. All calculations rely on a reference to the node so that you can copy, share, and update information between the form elements.

The mathematical calculation of a form allows users to be completely bothered by the errors that are caused by mathematical computations on the form. For example, you can create a tax table forms let IBM forms help you implement all the necessary calculations so that users can focus on filling in the initial value section without having to spend any more time doing manual calculations. IBM Form supports addition, subtraction, multiplication, addition, string, summation, exponentiation operations, and also provides a large number of mathematical formulas, such as sin (), tan (), and so on. If the formula provided by IBM Form is not enough, you can also insert your own formula.

In addition to mathematical calculations, the other part is conditional operations. The IBM forms implementation conditional operation is implemented using the If/then/else statement, and this part of the code is embedded in the XFDL form. For example, the following code fragment:

 <value compute= "Check1.value = = 

' on '?" Field1.value: ' "/>  

The main function of this code is that when the check box is selected, the label copies the Field1 value, otherwise it does nothing. As you can see from this code, the syntax implementation of conditional statements in IBM Forms is to use: "X?" Y:z "form.