The Aam Digital case management platform at its core is designed for you as a team to manage all relevant data. We are not primarily a data collection or survey form tool. However, you can allow outside people, who do not have a user account for your system, to submit new data - for example, letting participants self-register so that you don't have to type contact details from some other form into your database. This is what "Public Forms" are for. The link to a public form can be shared with anybody, they can fill the fields, and the submitted data directly creates a new record in your Aam Digital system.
Create a new Public Form
To create a new Public Form, open the Admin interface ("Edit Data Structure") for the list/record that the form should collect data for:
In the Admin UI for the record type, you can manage all Public Forms for that type. Navigate to the "Public Forms" section on the left menu within the Admin UI:
Then either select an existing Public Form to edit it or use the "+" button of that table to create a new one.
You can configure description and the link for the Public Form. Copy the link from the "Form Link ID" field and share it with people to use the form:
Use the tabs ("General Settings", "Configure Fields", ...) to also configure other aspects of the form.
"Configure Fields" using the drag&drop form builder to define which fields are visible to the person filling this form:
Pre-Filled values for form responses (e.g. status = "to be reviewed")
"Configure Pre-filled Values" to fix some field to a certain value without the user filling that into the form manually. This is especially important if you want to mark the records that were created through the form. You can then filter the list of your data to find and review submitted data, for example:
"Magic Links" to relate response to an individual case
If you are using a public form to collect feedback or endline survey data from your participants (and do not want this to be strictly anonymous) you can generate an individualized form link of the public form for each case. This link includes a unique ID and relates the response back to the case profile. You can then see the feedback / survey response of each participant in that person's profile in Aam Digital and analyze it in relation to all the other data you have for that case.
Consider a scenario where an external teacher (who doesn’t have an Aam Digital account) submits the latest literacy test scores for your students:
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You share a “magic link” with that person to a public form that links to that specific student.
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They open the public form, fill in the results, and submit (without needing to log in).
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You see the response directly linked into the details profile of that student in Aam Digital. You can compare it to previous test results and analyze it in context of the demographic and other activity data for that student also.
In this scenario, the Public Form is created for the record type “Literacy Test,” and the record type “Child” is linked to "Literacy Test" (through a field in the data structure of the "Literacy Test" data type, where you can also manually select the student the test refers to).
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Edit the Public Form (as shown above)
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Navigate to the tab “Configure Pre-filled values”
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Click on "Edit" there
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Scroll down to “Collect replies of this form linked to individual records”
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Click on “Linked Entities”
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Select the record type you want to link, e.g. Children
- Available to select here are only record types for which the Public Form's record type (in our example: "Literacy Test") has a field linking to that other type. This is required so that the form can save the relationship to it.
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Click on Save.
To get the custom form link, open a Child record (to which a public form response should be linked):
Open the context menu for the record type and select "Copy Custom Form" user:
