The Basics of Building Droplet Forms

Creating forms in Droplet is all about combining layout and workflow to make your forms both functional and visually appealing. Let’s explore how to bring your forms to life!

Layout

The layout is the first layer of form building and involves designing how your form looks and what information it collects. Forms are comprised of components, or fields.  There are a few varieties.  Here’s what you need to know about components:

Interactive Components
These components are the essential building blocks of a form, enabling users to input information. Key interactive elements include text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, dropdowns, tables, dates, and signatures.

Layout Components
These enhance your form’s appearance and functionality without being interactive. Use these components to group elements and apply display logic, ensuring the correct information and fields are visible at each workflow step.

Advanced Components
These add powerful functionality to your forms, but take a bit more prowess to hone. They include elements like timestamps, computed formulas, action buttons (submit, reject, save), and PDF stamps.

Required Components
There are 2 components that all Droplet forms need to work properly:

Submitter Name
COMPONENT IDsubmittedByName
This is an input component that collects the submitter's name.

Submitter Email
COMPONENT IDsubmittedByEmail
This is an email input component that collects the submitter's email address.

Every form starts with these two essential components. Be sure not to delete them or change their IDs.

For a deeper dive into available field types, check out our article on Components for Building Forms.

Workflow

Once your layout is ready, it’s time to set up the workflow. The workflow is a series of steps where each submission pauses, waiting for an assignee to review or add information, and to take action, such as approving, advancing, rejecting, or sending it back for corrections. To build your workflow, set the order of the steps and assign the right people to each one.

This guide will help you build your workflow.

Visibility

During each workflow step, the assignee might need to add information by filling out fields, signing their name, or approving or rejecting the submission. You’ll need to configure the visibility for each component or field in the layout at every workflow step. You can set permissions to make a field hidden, visible and read-only, or visible and editable.

Notification Emails

As you build your workflow, you can also set up custom notification emails. These emails keep everyone informed, whether they’re part of the workflow or just need to know about a form submission. Create these emails within the Workflow Layer using the Visual Editor, or in the Notification Layer using the Code Editor.

Optional Layers