Find a Data Form

Data Form Search and New Data Forms

You can find data forms from Administration > Application > Features. There is a Data form search and a link to a Data forms page that displays a data list that includes a Show filter. Once you have found a data form with the search list or the data list, you can open a page that displays feature metadata for the data form.

On the Features page, when you click Data form search, the Loaded Data Form Instance Search screen appears. It includes filters for Name, Record type, and Mode.

On the Features page, when you click New data forms, the Data forms page appears. It includes filters for Show, Record type, Mode, and Include all products.

Feature Metadata Pages

Whether from the Data forms page or the Loaded Data Form Instance Search screen, when you select a data form from the list, the feature metadata page for the data form appears.

Note: System record ID in the summary section of the page refers to the DataFormInstanceID for the data form and not to the ID. Other features reference data forms with the DataFormInstanceID for the data form and not the ID.

On the feature metadata page, under tasks, you can click View XML to see the spec XML for the feature. From the screen that appears, you can download the XML to a file.

Note: When you download the XML, the filename is based on the Name. It will probably not match the name of the file in the catalog assembly holding the spec that was loaded into the application. For example, the file that originally houses the Individual Add Form spec may be called Individual.Add.xml but the file you download is called Individual_Add_Form.xml. When specs are loaded into the application, the spec XML is stored in a table for the spec's catalog feature type. For data forms, the TEMPLATESPECXML column in [dbo].[DATAFORMTEMPLATECATALOG] contains the XML.

Note: There are actually two tables which contain information about the data form catalog: [dbo].[DATAFORMTEMPLATECATALOG] and [dbo].[DATAFORMINSTANCECATALOG]. Data forms were originally designed to support templates and instances. Hence the two tables and ID and DataFormInstanceID.

Design Mode

You can also reach the feature metadata page for a data form instance with design mode. If you right-click a task that opens the data form, you can select Go to > Data form instance.

Query

There is a Data Form Instance query view that can be used to create an ad-hoc query to find data forms. This enables searching for data forms based on a variety of characteristics. For example to find a data form that uses a collection field, you can use Include records where: Fields\Descriptor type is equal to Collection.