Lock and Unlock Fields on Form Workflows

The ability to lock and unlock fields offers a powerful way to control a Form as it moves through any number of workflow steps. Take the use case of a Professional Development Form, where a staff member wishes to attend a seminar or undertake some other PD. The workflow might be:

Staff member completes information about the seminar
Staff member forwards Form to Department Head for them to confirm budget line; append notes about requirements for another teacher to cover the absence.
Department Head forwards Form the Deputy Principal for Approval
Deputy Principal may Approve or Not Approve, and append their own notes.

Thus there are three groups of fields on the Form, and each group can be managed by a different person in the workflow.

Assign Fields to Groups

Fields on a Form Template can be allocated to a Group. When you edit a field you will see an option to allocate the field to a Field Group (1-15). Group 0 means the field is not allocated to a Group.

Can't see Field Groups?

If this option does not display, please contact Support to ensure this feature is enabled.

If you allocate Fields to a Group this will be displayed in the Form Builder after you Update Field.

Lock/Unlock Field Groups in Workflow Steps

Once you have Fields allocated to Groups, you can manage those Groups from the Workflow. From the below screenshot you can see that Field groups and their status are displayed for each of the steps.

What this means is Forms allow Users access to only the Field Groups that are unlocked for a particular step

For Eg: Arthi and Teresa in Step 3 below will have access to only the Fields that are part of Field group 3 which is unlocked, Fields from Group 1 and 2 will be greyed out.

When either of them completes Step 3 and 4 and send the form to Step 5, John Smith will have access to only fields from Group 3 as it is only group that is unlocked.

Please note it is recommended to maintain status for Groups in the Send Steps similar to their previous steps, so that the User actioning it won't lose access to the fields.

To edit the status for these Groups you need to click on the Edit button on the Workflow steps and select the radio buttons next to the Field Groups.

For example in the screenshot below Group 2 is unlocked and thus editable on Step 4, whilst Groups 1 and 3 are Locked and would not be available to be edited by Users in this Step.

Once all the steps are completed , all the Field Groups will be locked and the Form cannot be edited by any User.