[Levelbuilder] The Foorm Editor

Overview

‘Foorm’ is our in-house survey (or form) system. The second ‘o’ in Foorm is not a typo; it is there to distinguish from all the other forms we use. It is currently used for professional development workshop surveys, facilitator surveys, and occasional one-off surveys on our site. In its most basic form it is a standardized way of defining surveys and getting survey results.

Terminology

• Foorm Editor: Editing interface located here.
• Form/Survey Author: The person writing the form/survey configuration.
• SurveyJS: Survey configuration system we built Foorm on top of.

Getting Started

If you are writing a new survey, the best way to get started is to use the SurveyJS creator. The creator has a drag-and-drop interface for adding new survey questions and will generate the configuration for you automatically.

Survey Creation Guidelines

• Questions need a name and a title. name is the key we will use throughout survey processing, and should be all lowercase with underscores to separate words (ex. sample_question_name). title is what the user will see.
• Answers need a value and a text. For multiple choice questions (checkbox, radiogroup, matrix), give choices both a value and text. value is the key (similar to name for a question), and text is what the user sees. You can use the “Fast Entry” option on the surveyjs creator to make adding both easier--you write the options there as value|text. See this section at the bottom for how to set up answers for a matrix question in the "Fast Entry" option.
• Adding an “Other” answer. If you want an "other" option that allows the user to fill in text, use the Has other item checkbox--this will add other at the end of the list of options. If you want an "other" option that does not fill in text, do not give it the value of other; this will confuse surveyjs.
• Headings. If you want a heading in the middle of the page or a block of text, use the html question type. We generally use <h2> for headings mid-page. Here is some helpful HTML if you want to add a scale describing a set of matrix questions.
• Variables. If you want a variable to be filled in later (ex. the name of a course), surround the variable name with {}. See Variables for more details.
• For most questions you can make the key (value for a multiple choice question, name for the question title) whatever makes the most sense, as long as it is lower-case with underscores. There are a few exceptions to this, see Rollup Questions.

Once you have the questions you want, go over to the “JSON Editor” tab in the SurveyCreator. Copy the json and go to the Foorm Editor to get a preview of what it will look like on our site!

Using the Foorm Editor

The Foorm Editor is located here. You need an account on levelbuilder with levelbuilder permissions. Talk to an engineer if you don’t have an account set up yet.

On opening the editor, either click “Load Form” and select a form, or “New Form” if creating a new form. You will then see a json editor and preview panel. Any changes you make to the json will be visible in the preview within a second. If you don’t want to see changes as you write, you can turn off the live preview with the toggle at the top of the page.

If you want to test variables in your form, you can use the predefined set of variables in the editor on the “Variables” tab next to the editor. These variables are available for our professional development surveys. If you need a new variable and/or are writing a form for a different use case, talk to an Engineer.

As you write your form, you can click the “Validate” button at the top of the page to see if you would get any validation errors on saving the form.

Beyond Getting Started (Directory of Docs)

Coming Soon!