Nintex Forms – Content Type Forms
Those of you who haven’t already seen Nintex Forms, go and take a look here: Nintex Forms.
One of my favorite features of Nintex Forms, is the ability to simply click on the Nintex Forms button in my list and have it generate a form for me. It interrogates the list, maybe even the content type I assigned to the list and knows what controls to put on the form and uses my forms template to create the form. That saves me a lot of work that I would otherwise have to do.
There’s an interesting feature that is hidden away in Site Settings that some people don’t know about. It is the ability to design forms for content types.
Imagine if you have a number of lists in your site where you use the same content type. If you wanted to customize a form for these lists, you’d be looking at designing a form on each list. Basically, that means doing the same work 3 times. Alternatively, you may take a different tactic and design the form in one list, then export it to file then import the design into the other 3 lists. So that’s a little less work, but it’s still not ideal. If you want to make a change to the design, you will need to do this process again.
Content Type Forms
First off, we want to create our Content Type.
In my example, I have a content type called Corporate Content Type with a Title, Nation (choice) and Current Age (Number) fields.
I’ve assigned this content type to all 3 of my lists. If I go to create a new item, based on this content type, I’ll get the usual out-of-the-box SharePoint form:
Now we want to customize this form using Nintex Forms. We need to jump out of the list and go to Site Settings > Site Content Types and click on our Content Type. What we will see, is a new link available there called “Edit form with Nintex Forms” :
Clicking on this link will bring up the Nintex Forms designer where it will generate a form design for us and we’ll be able to customize it if we need to. My template is not branded, so I’m going to change the background to grey, so that it stands out and looks different to the SharePoint form.
Once the design is done, publish the form using the Publish button on the ribbon and our work is done.
What is the result of this work?
Now that the form has been designed, you can go into any list in your site that uses that content type, and when you go to creaet a new item, view an item or edit an item, it will bring up the customized Nintex Form.
It also means that you can go back to the form design and make any changes you need to the form, and all the lists will automatically inherit these changes. No longer will you need to export and import the form.