Introducing Experimental Form Templates

[merefield (Robert)]

I’m trying to build quite a long one to replace a Category Template.

But I’m getting an error that its too big:

However, this setting is set higher:

Is this not the same thing, or is this a bug?

I scanned the code briefly, but couldn’t find the answer.

I feel 5,000 is a little restrictive, can we double it or make it its own setting?

Oh I see now, it’s an Active Record error, and the original migration is here:

discourse/discourse/blob/f2e669a008f49a0b37dec3cd0dd861493b292a05/db/migrate/20230202173641_create_form_templates.rb#L7

[jericson (Jon Ericson)]

I’ve used regular templates for things and while I find the feature more useful than not having a template, the resulting formatting always looks off because it’s not clear how to enter the data.^[1] So having a custom form is great!

Feedback:

1. I really miss having links. (And to a lesser degree, Markdown formatting.) If people don’t know what an option means, it would be handy to point them at the documentation. [I believe this and the next point are addressed by Introducing Experimental Form Templates - #64 by Tris20]
2. I’d like to have a way to add instructions or an introduction. Ideally with links.
3. The title of the post and tags seem to be part of the form. It’s awkward that we can’t customize the prompt. In this form, I’d like the proposed group name to be the title, but it’s not clear how to signal that to users so I added a redundant field:
   
   
4. In the same vein, it’d be interesting to include some way to prompt people to use specific tags. For instance, a support system might use tags to help triage a ticket. The form could include a dropdown with the relevant tags and automatically apply it to the topic. Maybe the same thing with categories too.
5. It’s not immediately obvious that the multi-select allows more than one choice. You need to know to use Control or Shift to select more than one, from what I can tell.
6. It’d be neat if checkboxes where represented as checkboxes^[2] in the resulting post:

   Is the box checked?

7. Trying to submit a blank form does nothing and doesn’t show an error. (In fairness, I could add a validation or two to fix this.)

On the whole, this feature really does check a lot of boxes^[3] for my purposes. (I’m working on a way for people to propose new groups on my community-building platform.)

---

1. The Ask Wizard on Stack Overflow started life as a very crude tamplate. My experience with that colors the way I look at this feature in general. I’ve also used the current Discourse template system for an essay feedback system. ↩︎

2. At the moment it’s a heading with either “on” if the box is checked. ↩︎

3. Heh! ↩︎

[jericson (Jon Ericson)]

Oh. I just noticed the form input isn’t saved as a draft. If you close the draft, the topic title is saved, but not anything in a text box or input. Ugh.

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

@jericson

I really miss having links. (And to a lesser degree, Markdown formatting.) If people don’t know what an option means, it would be handy to point them at the documentation.

I got feedback elsewhere and meant to follow up on this, thanks for the nudge

@Danielle

The description field accepts a hyperlink using HTML, it’s currently the only HTML element allowed and only in the description.

So to set up ToS checkboxes with links to terms you can do something like

- type: checkbox
  id: read-chatgpt-guidelines
  attributes:
    label: "I have read and I agree to the latest ChatGPT guidelines"
    description: '<a href="https://discourse.company.com/t/current-gpt-and-bing-guidelines/4348"> Click here for the latest ChatGpt Giudelines</a>'
  validations:
    required: true   
- type: checkbox
  id: accept-workspace
  attributes:
    label: "I will not use the @workspace command in customer project if I am using Github Co-pilot"
    description: '<a href="https://discourse.company.com/t/for-compliance-reasons-the-workspace-command-must-not-be-used-in-customer-projects/4371">Click here for details about @workspace command</a>'
  validations:
    required: true        

Which looks like this:

---

@jericson

The title of the post and tags seem to be part of the form. It’s awkward that we can’t customize the prompt. In this form, I’d like the proposed group name to be the title, but it’s not clear how to signal that to users so I added a redundant field:

This is also the only pain point I have with Forms at the moment. It’s just a bit un-intuitive for users, and being able to auto-populate the title would be very helpful.

[jericson (Jon Ericson)]

@Tris20

I think the solution was to html encapsulate it in the description section.

Yes this works. The description field might be what I need to serve as introduction/instructions too. Thanks for the tip!

[stuwest]

As Tristan said above, it would be very useful to me to be able to populate the topic title from the form responses.

So if we had a form where users could submit their bio and whether they are a dog or a cat lover, we would like the topic to show up as “Cat-lover bio: John Smith” or “Dog-lover bio: Ralph McLeash” etc.

This is a really great feature! Is it still classed as experimental? I’m currently using an external form that posts by email to my forum, and I’d love to replace that with this, if there’s a sense that it’s going to stick around long-term.

[jericson (Jon Ericson)]

@Tris20

This is also the only pain point I have with Forms at the moment. It’s just a bit un-intuitive for users, and being able to auto-populate the title would be very helpful.

I’m trying something where I use a checkbox to tell people how to fill in the title. It’s not ideal, but I think it’s the best alternative we have right now:

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Just started playing around with this. First impressions: very nice! Thanks!!

As this expands, I would love to see:

• Conditional fields, i.e. the text fields some forms add when you choose “Other” from the list of options.
  My specific case: If from the dropdown, you choose SonarQube, I want to then prompt you for its version

• I would also love to be able to pull the values for a dropdown from some other place, presumably a post.

  Why? Let’s go back to the question of versions. Ideally, I wouldn’t prompt users to type them in free-form, but would give them a list of versions, latest first.

  The problem with this is two-fold

  • I want to present these lists in multiple different templates
  • versions keep being released

  Which means that with each release, I have n templates to update with the new version number, and hopefully I remember to update all of them.

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Our CSS changes (so far) In case it’s helpful to someone else:

// remove the grey background
.d-editor #form-template-form {
    background-color: var(--secondary);
}

// stop stretching the fields to 100% width
.form-template-field select, .form-template-field input {
    width: auto;
}

.form-template-field textarea {
    min-width: 650px;
    width: auto;
}

[JammyDodger]

Thanks to everyone for the feedback. I’m going to close out this announcements topic now and encourage anyone with any ux, feature, bug, or support requests for this feature to open a new topic in the appropriate category and pop a form-templates tag on it.