Customising Form Layouts gives you a great degree of flexibility to change the appearance of Workbooks records so that they reflect your business, your terminology and your processes.  Multiple versions of the layout can be created for the same record type and shared with different User Groups so that, for example, your Sales team see one version of a Customer Order and your Finance team see a different version, or your Customer Support team see one version of an Organisation record and your Marketing team see another.

The Form Layout menu can be reached by going to Start > Configuration > Customisation > [select the record type you wish to edit] > Form Layouts.

Custom Form Layouts are based on existing standard form layouts and include any Custom Fields you've created (along with their related Picklists, where appropriate).

When creating a new Form Layout you can specify:

• new Sections that can be positioned within the form and add sub-sections and/or Fields to them.
• the position of Fields within a form - both their Section and their position within that Section.
• whether Fields are displayed or not.
• whether Fields are read-only or not.
• default values for Fields.
• add Information Messages relating to aspects of the form, and position them on the form layout.
• for forms with editable grids, what columns are shown, hidden or excluded, the order in which they appear and the default values for each.
• what tabs are displayed and in what order.
• a set of Process Buttons (in the Automation tab) to allow you to automate common processes.

Once you've set up a new Form Layout you can publish the view and share it with other Users and/or User Groups.

When using Form Layouts, you can categorise them to ensure that only relevantly categorised email/PDF templates appear when dealing with the specific record type. Information of how to do so can be found in the screenshot below.

Information Messages

Information Message fields allow you to display relevant and useful information under the fields. To add an Information Message field, click the button highlighted below.

The field can contain up to 255 characters and include hyperlinks.

Name the Information Message field in such a way that it is easy to know what the help text is for. Field Name is visible when amending form layouts, but isn’t visible on the forms themselves.

The example below shows how Information Messages can be used to make it easier for users to know what fields represent and how they should be used. 

It is possible to add hyperlinks into the Information Message using the format: <a href="URL">text</a>. For example,

<a href="www.workbooks.com/knowledge_base">Knowledge Base</a>

would display the words 'Knowledge Base' which would hyperlink to the URL that is between the double quote marks.