Optimizing Forms For Workflow Studio

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Below you will find suggestions from our Technical Specialist Team to help you optimize your Forms to pair well with Workflow Studio.

Collect standardized answers whenever possible.

Using the Select One, Select Multiple, and Select Worker Items will give you the cleanest version of your data. This also avoids situations where Workers may type answers slightly differently, creating the possibility of errors in your Workflow. For instance, if you were filtering for when an Incident Severity equals "Critical" and a Worker typed "Crucial" instead, the workflow would not continue, which could mean no one is notified about the incident.

Using Select Worker or Select Multiple Workers is great because it not only outputs the person's name but also their unique Worker ID, which can be used to get their personal details and even schedule Forms or send Chat messages for them.

If you need to do any math with number answers, use Number Only Items.

Workflow Studio can use Number Only items to do Math, like totalling up Kilometers driven from a Vehicle Inspection or totalling Hours Worked from a Time Sheet. With Short or Long Answer questions, Workflow Studio does not recognize numbers, as the output type for these items is "text" not "number".

Using Select Multiple Items can be complicated.

Because there is the potential for these items to contain several answers to the same item, the output for these items are Collections, which then need to be converted into Arrays and Iterated through in order to use the data well. While this is not impossible or even very difficult to do, it is extra steps and actions in your Workflow, so keep that in mind when creating your Form.

Using Repeatable Sections can be complicated.

Like Select Multiple items, because there is the potential for these Sections to contain several iterations of the same Section, the output for these Sections are Collections, which then need to be converted into Arrays and Iterated twice in order to use the data well. While this is not impossible or even very difficult to do, it is extra steps and actions in your Workflow, so keep that in mind when creating your Form.