Form designer

A form defines a kind of record — a customer, a product, an order. The designer is a visual, drag-and-drop canvas: you place fields, set their widths, and decide which ones show in the table view. Every record you create later is shaped by this form.

The 12-column canvas#

Fields are laid out on a 12-column grid. Each field has a column span that controls how wide it sits in the entry form:

Drag fields from the palette onto the canvas, then drag them around to reorder. Layout elements — Multi Tab, Banner, Named Line, Line, Combiner and Add Entry Button — let you group and label sections without storing data.

Field types#

OBIC ships more than twenty field types, grouped by purpose:

A few worth calling out:

• Suffix captures honorifics like Mr / Ms / Dr.
• User picks a member of your workspace; set it to auto-fill the current user for "created by"-style fields.
• Formula computes a value from other fields.
• Line Items embeds a mini-table inside a record — line columns, pulled fields, and per-row formulas — ideal for an order's products.
• Lookup pulls a read-only value from a referenced record.
• Combiner displays a computed string from a template such as {first_name} {last_name}.

Field properties#

Every field exposes a handful of switches:

• Required — the field must be filled in to save a record.
• Show in table — the field appears as a column in the list view.
• Hide label — render the field without its label in the entry form.
• Hidden — mask the value (shown as ****) until revealed; available for text, number, dropdown, email and phone.
• Column width — the grid span described above.

Reference fields#

A Reference field links one form to another — a Sale referencing its Customer, for example. References are how relational data is modelled in OBIC.

• Display field — which field of the referenced record to show (e.g. company_name).
• Multi-select — allow many references for a many-to-many relationship.
• Inline layout — show several fields from the referenced record inline, each with its own column span, optionally with search and an add button.
• Cascading filter — restrict the choices based on another reference field on the same form, so picking a Manufacturer narrows the Product list.

Uniqueness#

Two field types enforce uniqueness:

• Unique (form) — the value must be unique within this form.
• Unique (all) — the value must be unique across every form in the workspace.

Use these for identifiers like SKUs, order numbers or email addresses.

Conditional fields#

A field can carry a visibility gate — it stays hidden unless another field holds one of a set of values. This keeps long forms tidy by revealing sections only when they apply. Gates are part of OBIC's broader access model; see Access control for field- and option-level rules.