To create a new form in Form Modeler, do the following:

The form displays. You can add various types of fields to it when you select the Add fields by type option on the Form Modeler tab. Use the button to place the field types onto the canvas, where you can modify them. To modify the field types, use the icons that display when you place the cursor over a field: First, Move field, Last, Group with previous, Edit, or Clear. The icons enable you to change the order of the fields in the form, group the fields, or clear and edit their content.

The following figure shows a new form created in Form Modeler.

To open an existing form in a project that already has a form defined, go to Form Definitions in Project Explorer and select the form you want to work with from the displayed list.

To set the properties of a form field, do the following:

You can generate forms automatically from process variables and task definitions and later modify the forms using the form editor. In runtime, forms receive data from process variables, display it to the user, capture user input, and update the process variables with the new values. To configure a process in Form Modeler, do the following:

In the Process Designer module, you can generate forms automatically from task and variable definitions, and easily open concrete forms from Form Modeler by using the following menu option: To open and edit a form directly, click the Edit Task Form icon ( ) located above a user task. Forms follow a naming convention that relates them to tasks. If you define a form named formName-taskform in the same package as the process, the human task engine will use the form to display and capture information entered by the user. If you create a form named ProcessId-task, the application will use it as the initial form when starting the process.

After you generate a form, you can start editing it. If the form has been generated automatically, the Form data origin tab contains the process variables as the origin of the data, which allows you to bind form fields with them and create data bindings. Data bindings determine the way task input is mapped to form variables, and when the form is validated and submitted, the way values update output of the task. You can have as many data origins as required, and use different colors to differentiate them in the Render color drop down menu. If the form has been generated automatically, the application creates a data origin for each process variable. For each data origin bindable item, there is a field in the form, and these automatically generated fields also have defined bindings. When you display the fields in the editor, the color of the data origin is displayed over the field to give you quick information on correct binding and implied data origin. To customize a form, you can for example move fields, add new fields, configure fields, or set values for object properties.

You can place fields in different areas of the form. To move a field, access the field's contextual menu and select the Move field option shown on the following screenshot. This option displays the different regions of the form where you can place the field. After you click the Move field option, a set of rectangular contextual icons appears. To move a field, select one of them according to the desired new position of the field.

You can add fields to a form by their origin or by selecting the type of the form field. The Add fields by origin tab allows you to add fields to the form based on defined data origins. The fields then have correct configuration of the Input binding expression and Output binding expression properties, so when the form is submitted, the values in the fields are stored in the corresponding data origin. The Add fields by type tab allows you to add fields to the form from the fields type palette of the Form Modeler. The fields do not store their value for any data origin until they have correct configuration of the Input binding expression and Output binding expression properties. There are three kinds of field types you can use to model your form: simple types, complex types, and decorators. The simple types are used to represent simple properties like texts, numeric values, or dates. The following table presents a complete list of supported simple field types: Complex field types are designed for work with properties that are not basic types but Java objects. To use these field types, it is necessary to create extra forms in order to display and write values to the specified Java objects. Decorators are a kind of field types that does not store data in the object displayed in the form. You can use them for decorative purposes.

Each field can be configured to enhance performance of the form. There is a group of common properties called generic field properties and a group of specific properties that differs by field type.

Generic field properties: