About the Form Designer Components

Every custom form contains the same components. As the designer of a custom form in TMS, you are responsible for putting these components together in a way that is best for your organization. The following are the major components of the Form Designer.

Defaults

Defaults are selections you set in the form designer that are usually the first choice of the person who is using TMS. You can also set default values in the Setup menu.

For example, if the majority of work orders in your organization are corrective maintenance work orders, you can set the Work Order Type field to Corrective Maintenance. Now, when a user wants to enter a work order into TMS, the Work Order Type field is set, by default, to Corrective Maintenance. You can set defaults for everyone, a single data segment, a group of users, and a single user.

• Application Defaults – You can set defaults for the entire application for fonts, group box labels, field labels, and fields.
• Module Defaults – Module defaults are inherited from application defaults. You can set defaults for each module for fonts, group box labels, field labels, and fields.
• Field Defaults – Field defaults are inherited from module defaults. You can change a default field label, set a default field value, make a field required by default, hide a field from a user, make a field read-only, change the font of a field, and set default field level help.
• User Defined Field (UDF) Defaults – You can set default properties for user defined fields.

Custom forms

• Form – A form is a set of one or more tabs containing fields associated with a single module.
• Tab – A tab (for example, the Main tab) is a container for field groups, fields, and grids. A form might contain multiple tabs, but only one tab can be visible at a time.
• Group Box – A group box, also called a field group, is a container for fields (for example, the Required group box contains the Status field).
• Field Label – The field label is the text that appears above a field’s data control to indicate to the user what data to enter in the control. For example, the field label Description indicates that the user should enter text that describes a work order into the data control.
• Field (data control) – The data control, like a textbox or drop-down menu, where the user can enter the data which should be associated with this field for this record in the database.
• Field – A field is a field label plus a data control associated with a TMS data point (usually a column in a table in the database). A field can have various properties such as required, visible, and read-only. Some fields are required by TMS to appear on forms associated with certain modules. For example, in the Work Orders module, the Description field is a required field.
• Grids – A grid is a tabular display of multiple database records. In TMS, grid records can be sorted, grouped, and filtered. An example of a grid is the Time Charges grid.