How to create custom forms in SharePoint

Introduction

As a Web site administrator in SharePoint, I am always looking for new tools to help in the design and development of SharePoint forms because sometimes it is hard to customize your forms to provide a good user experience in SharePoint. That might imply much expenses and require a lot of time. That is why it is necessary to have a new tool to help us enrich the functionality of the SharePoint Forms.

KWizComForms is a plug-in that can be used to create customized, robust and advanced forms in minutes with a minimal knowledge in the SharePoint Forms design. There is also a SharePoint Online version of KWizCom Forms App for Office 365.

I will show you my experience with KWizCom Forms after doing some tests and let you know my point of view about it.

Getting Started

Let's take a look to a simple demo about this KWizCom Forms feature.

We will first show how to hide fields dynamically according to a user or user group.

First step

In this example, the field "Full name" will be hidden when a user or user group contains the string "Jose". To do this, you need to select the field to be hidden (Full name), assign a permission type (hide) and check the page types required:

It is necessary to create the condition specifying that if the user name contains the word Jose, the field full name will be hidden:

Second step

If you try to open the form with a user named Jose, the Full name field is hidden:

Third step

If you login with a user whose name is not Jose, the full name field is displayed:

This is a very useful feature, because we can configure fields according to the user groups and user names. For example, we can hide the salary to the marketing group, but have the field visible for the Financial group.

How to add error messages according to field values

Sometimes we need to display error messages according to specific values. In this example, if the sender bank is Montesori Bank and the delay days is greater than 90, we want an error message specifying that the delay cannot be higher than 90 days.

To do that, we will choose the Sender Bank field as the field to be validated (validate field) and we will also specify the error message:

The rule created is that if the Sender Bank is Montesori Bank and the Delay days is greater than 90, the error message should be displayed.

If we open the SharePoint form, if the name is Montesori, an error Message is displayed:

Dynamic default values

You can also specify dynamic values according specific user or user groups or according to specific field values. In the next example, we will create default values for the Sender Bank and C.I for the user named user:

The sender bank value by default, will be Mike Bank and the default value for the C.I. will be 10000001:

If we open the SharePoint form, the values are set by default according the user specifications:

 And that is not all. With KWizCom Forms you can also:

• Use custom expressions
• Work with Tabs
• Import and export configurations
• Support multiple languages
• You can print and convert forms to PDF files
• It is compatible with multiple browsers
• It allows to create custom actions
• You can create KPI
• And more

  

Conclusion

In my experience, this tool is very powerful to create forms in SharePoint when you try to enter data using SharePoint list that allows to have a robust form with a complete set of validations and configurations with custom level of permissions, etc. To create all these rules and constraints without the tool you may need a team of developers with a lot of experience with SharePoint to create forms using InfoPath or other tool. This tool allows to have robust forms in a few minutes and does not require you to be an expert in forms. That saves a lot of resources, time and money to the companies.