Introduction

Telephone Message Pad starts you with message taking forms. These forms can be used as is. You are not locked into the forms we provide. You may customize them to suit your needs.

These starting forms are system-wide and may not be edited or deleted because they are shared by all users. However, you can make a copy (clone) and then edit the clone. That clone is private to your account. All users in your account may be able to use the cloned form, where it will appears as a choice in the Forms menu for your account.

The form manager

In the the Admin >> Form_Manager you will see a list of templates with a clone button next to each. Click the clone button (not the template name).

Here we will clone the contact2 form and name it contact_2. After doing so, we see that contact_2 has additional buttons for edit and delete. The contact_2 form also shows up on the forms menu. When we asked you above not to click the template name, that is because clicking the name toggles visibility on the forms menu and places the template on the bottom panel of the Form_Manager. That bottom panel defaults to collapsed and you need to click the expand_panel button to put it on the forms menu.

Click the edit button and we see the visible and editable fields of the contact_2 form. Many of these fields are system defined and may not be edited or deleted. Most of the names follow fields available on the contact_2 form. Note that all of the fields have a "new" button.

That new button allows us to insert a new field in the slot following the new button selected.

The Standard Edit Interface

When we select one of the "new" buttons from the Form_Manager, we are take to the Standard Edit Interface. This requests we specify what type of field we want to add. There are 7 selections presented:

textbox A single line of free form text may be entered.

decimal A number may be entered. You can specify whether to use a comma or a period to use as a decimal point. At most one decimal point may occur in a decimal. The other character may be used to separate groups of numbers. Parenthesis, leading "-", or trailing "-" may all be used to denote negative numbers. Space may not appear.

radio and dropdown A selection from one and only one out of a list must be made. The first item you specify becomes the default selection. The presentation of the list differs between these two and follows the image corresponding to the selection button.

checkbox Any combination of selections from a list is made. The first item you specify becomes the default selection. The default is none selected.

static You can put text on the form that is not editable. Use this for section identification, titles, or instructions.

multiline Multiple lines of free form text may be entered. address is a variant of multiline which accepts street address data and creates a single click link to a Google map of the address.

We had seriously considered adding date and time fields but decided not to because of the wide variety of date/time formats. Unless we error check against the format, you may as well specify the textbox. Indeed, that is what we recommend: use the textbox for date/time entry. Another factor was that many vague date/time formats may fail error checking and yet convey legitimate meaning: "next 3 hours", "asap", "by Friday", "next week", etc.

There is also no separate telephone field. The contact2 and whileout2 system forms have built-in telephone number support for 2 and 1 numbers respectively. These telephone fields generate a clickable link to dial and connect to the phone number when viewed on a mobile phone.