Understanding Jotform forms

JotForm is a very flexible tool for creating customisable forms that are available online. They provide you with a number of specialised form fields. In particular, we encourage you to utilise form fields already provided by Jotform. These are basic fields (eg. email, phone etc) and advanced fields.

Basic form fields and things to note:

• Email: provides email validation to make sure your clients provide a real email address.
• Phone: provides a masked input to help them enter a phone number. When mapping a phone number to the number in AppointmentGuru, AppointmentGuru will assume the local country code for your account (eg. +27).
• Date Picker: make sure to check the date format, and potentially set a default date (eg. you can set the default to today).
• Page break: If you have long forms, this is a great way to break them into sections, making them less intimidating for the client (eg. sections for consent, contact information, medical aid information etc).

Advanced form fields:

• Fill in the blank: this is useful for consent forms, allowing you to capture information such as:

  I _, the undersigned with ID number _ agree to the terms and conditions as laid out above.

• Signature: this provides a field where the client can sign their signature using their finger on their device.

Tips:

• If you are capturing the date separately, turn off show timestamp on PDF for the signature field.
• Don't use the full name field; rather, use individual short text fields for first name and last name. This will be easier to map to your profile in AppointmentGuru.
• If you need a checkbox (eg. the client needs to accept the terms and conditions), create a single opt-in/out option by using a Multiple Choice field. Remove all choices except one (you may also want to remove the question, where it states "type question here"). The result is that you have a single opt-in or out field. If it is required that they select this box (as would be the case when accepting terms and conditions), you can make it required.
• Jotform offers conditional logic where you can show/hide fields, or set the value of one field based on the value of another field. For example:
  • For forms that have repetitive fields (like name, phone number or email), they can be automatically filled out throughout the form where they repeat.
  • When capturing medical aid information, you can have a tickbox (eg. Patient is a dependant) which will only show relevant fields once it's ticked.
  • Include a tick box for the parent or guardian to indicate their role, and then show or hide relevant fields accordingly.