A Few Tips for Styling Responsive Forms with Aras Innovator

In previous posts, we’ve covered the basics of responsive forms. In this blog, we will dive even deeper and share some tips and tricks for making responsive forms more visually appealing to your end users. Here are a few tips on how to make your responsive forms convey more information in the same space.

Nested columns

In our first introductory blog on responsive forms, we outlined how your form can be broken down into columns to better organize your properties. A cool thing that you might not know is that you can actually break your columns into additional columns. While that might sound complicated, our UI makes it very simple to configure. Here’s a quick look at what this looks like in action:

To configure this, you need to open your responsive form editor and just drag a box from the Structure tab into one of your columns:

From here, you can select any of your unused properties and drop them directly into the new columns you’ve created. It’s important to keep in mind the length of your property when doing this and reserve this practice for shorter properties. Good examples are things like Revision, State, Generation, Part Number, and things like Booleans or Cost.

Color coding important properties

In another of my previous blogs, I showed how you can set rules to customize your forms. These can be based on things like who is viewing the form or what the actual value of the property is. This can be used in multiple different ways, but one that I’ve found useful is to check the current variable of your item and style the Revision property a different color if you’re not looking at the most current version of the Item. This gives your user a very quick visual indication that they might be looking at an older version of an Item. Here’s a quick look at what that rule would look like:

Another great place to use this is on lifecycle/workflow states. Using a simple color code allows users to quickly understand what is happening with their Items once they open a form. I recommend playing around with these to see what is possible.

In the same vein, utilizing rules to hide specific properties from identities is much easier than it was in the old form system. This allows you to have fewer specialized views, which require less maintenance.

Concluding thoughts

Responsive forms continue to receive enhancements with each release. There has never been a better time to give them a try, and trying is as simple as pressing this button on your Item’s form:

Keep in mind that this button just changes your view and doesn’t overwrite any of your existing forms. You can freely switch back and forth between your classic and responsive forms. Give them a try, and let us know what you’re able to build! Consider sharing with colleagues via comments. We want to hear from you.