Fields

What's a Field?

A field is an element of a form (like a question).

There are multiple field types in Formium. The basic fields are: Radio, Checkboxes, Short Answer, Long Answer, Email, and URL. We're adding more and more fields each week, but we figured these are the bare minimum required to get the platform up and running.

All fields have a title and an optional description and type.

Fields have few shared options such as its initial visibility, whether it is required or not, its default value, etc. Some fields may also have special options that are relevant only to that kind of field.

Note: Fields may have "child" fields. For example, all the options of a Checkboxes field are also technically Choice fields.

Keys

Each field also has an administrative key that is used to represent the answer to it in each submission with your form as well as CSV exports and API integrations.

When you add a field to a form in the Formium Dashboard, Formium will attempt to generate this key for you once you're done typing the question title. When you change a question key, do it with caution, as new submissions with an answer to that question will use the new key, but old submissions will remain as they were with old one. When you create workflows (described later), a field's value will be available as template variables under {{values.<key>}}. But more on that later...

To add a field to a form simply click on the Add Question button at the bottom of the Editor or drag one of the fields from the left into the position of your choice on the right. To edit a field you have added to a form, simply hover over the field you would like to edit and click it. To a delete a field you can click the trash icon, be aware that Deleting a field does NOT delete historical entry data associated with that form field.

To get here, log in to your account, open an existing form or start a new one, and go to the Editor panel.

Shared Field Settings

Title

The title of the field. Use this to ask your question.

Help Text / Description

Use this to include helpful information or instructions to help end-users fill out the field correctly.

Placeholder

The placeholder text to show when the field's input is empty.

Default Value

The default value of the field.

Hidden

Whether or not the field should be hidden by default. You can use conditional logic to toggle its visibility based on the values of the form. Also useful when you require the functionality of this field but do not want the user to be able to see this field.

Required

You can use this feature to get the answers you really need. You can require a response to vital questions on your form, and customize the error message that respondents see when they don't complete the question.

Required Text

Custom text to show in the error message if this field is empty and required.

Allow field to be populated dynamically?

Check this option to enable query string parameter data to be used to pre-populate this field dynamically. This allows you to create links to pre-populated forms. For example, if you have a field with a key of name and you check this option, you'll be able to pre-populate (and override the default value) of the name field by appending ?name=XXXXX to the URL of your form, where XXXX is the URL encoded value. This option also allows you to specify a custom parameter name as well.

Developer Note: this functionality may require special usage of @formium/react that may depend on the framework you use (e.g. Next.js, Gatsby, React Router, etc.).

Standard Fields Reference

Radio

The Radio field allows users to select an option from a list. All options are displayed at the same time and only one option from the available choices can be selected.

General Settings

Choices

• Add a new choice by clicking the PLUS icon or pressing enter
• Delete a choice by clicking the DELETE icon or the pressing the delete key in an empty choice
• Reorder choices by dragging the DRAG icon (on the far left)

Checkboxes

Use this when you want users to choose multiple options from a range of answers to a question and want to display all options at the same time.

General Settings

Choices

• Add a new choice by clicking the PLUS icon or pressing enter
• Delete a choice by clicking the DELETE icon or the pressing the delete key in an empty choice
• Reorder choices by dragging the DRAG icon (on the far left)

Short Answer

If you want a short written answer from people, this is what you need.

Long Answer

This is ideal if you want people to write you longer multiline answers.

Email

This only accepts correctly formatted email addresses as answers: xxxx@yyy.zzz. If someone tries to add text in the wrong format, they will see a warning message, and have to try again.

URL

This only accepts correctly formatted URLs as answers: http://apple.com. If someone tries to add text in the wrong format, they will see a warning message, and have to try again.