Favorite Feature Friday – End of Form Navigation Explained

CommCare is a powerful and robust tool that allows you to create everything from simple surveys to sophisticated applications with complex workflows. Every Friday we ask members of our Field Team to share their favorite features—and how they use them—to help customers leverage CommCare in exciting new ways (haven’t yet tried CommCare? Create an account for free here to follow along).

End of Form Navigation is the third feature in this series. You can see our last Favorite Feature Friday post about Form Conditions here.

This Friday we’re hearing from Dimagi’s Meryn Robinson, a Project Manager based in Boston!

Video: End of Form Navigation Explained

Creator: Meryn Robinson, Dimagi Project Manager

Topic: Meryn explains End of Form Navigation and how it can be useful for your CommCare application. She’ll cover the benefits of using the feature, and how to configure the different options available to you. End of Form Navigation is especially useful for people looking to improve their end-user’s efficiency by controlling what screen is displayed after filling out a form.

Need More Information? You can read more about End of Form Navigation here.

Read the transcript below and stay tuned next Friday for another one of our Dimagi Field Team’s favorite features.

Meryn: Hi everyone, this is Meryn and I’m a Project Manager at Dimagi. Today I’m going to talk about how to use End of Form navigation and why it’s useful.

End of form navigation is a way to configure your app so that you can control which screen your end-user sees after they submit a form. There’s a few different options, first I’ll show you where this lives on CommCareHQ and then I’ll show you what the options are.

Setting End of Form Navigation

To set End of Form Navigation go to the Form Page on CommCareHQ. Navigate to settings tab, and at the  bottom you’ll see the logic section. The End of Form Navigation drop down should have four options.

The first one is the home screen, you’ll see that starred because that’s the default setting. If you create a form, that will be what the option is set to unless you change it. The other three are the first menu, the menu of the the menu that you’re in currently, and the previous screen.

Now I’ll show you what each of these settings looks like and some situations where you’d want to use them.

Option #1: Home Screen

The first option is the home screen. In my Registration Form I’ll register a test person. When I click finish we’ll see the screen that we are brought back to is the home screen. This isn’t the most useful of these options in terms of how an end-user might be going through a workflow. Now, I have to go click a bunch of times to get back to the list of forms that I want to fill out.

Let’s go through the other three, which you might find more useful depending on the workflow of your own forms.

Option #2: Menu of the Menu That You’re in Right now

The second option is the menu of the menu that you’re in right now. Let’s go through the counseling form to see this. When I click the finish button at the end of the form we end up back on the screen we were just in, the menu where we can see all our forms for that menu.

You might want to consider this for situations when you have, let’s say a home visit, where there are several different forms you need to fill out for the same case. That way you can go through the list of forms and not need to continuously keep selecting the same case over and over.

Option #3: First Menu

Now, lets see the option where you are brought back to the first menu. In this app the follow up form will do that. When we select finish, you’ll see we’re brought back to the beginning list of menus (the first screen you saw after the home screen.)

Option #4: Previous Screen

The last option you have is navigating to your previous screen. We are going to use a supervisor visit in this app, so I’ll click one of our Community Health Workers and we’ll go through and finish the form. We’re then brought back to the previous screen that we saw previously, which is a case list.

It’s important to note that depending on the setting for your menu, this might show you a different screen, but the way our app is configured, it will send us back to the case list. This is a powerful way to fill out the same form for a lot of people at one time. For example, We can go through and fill out the information for Gene, and then very quickly I can go back and I can fill it out for Mary, etc., etc. Depending on your workflow, this method could be a powerful way to fill out the same form for multiple units or cases very quickly.

That’s an overview of End of Form Navigation! If you’re interested in trying out the feature, but don’t yet have a CommCare account, you can start a free trial here. See you next Friday!