Creating And Editing Records

Almost everything you put into your application, you put in through a form: a stack of labeled boxes with a Save button at the bottom. This chapter explains how those forms behave — how you start one, how it is laid out, how it checks what you typed, why parts of it sometimes reload while you are working, and exactly what happens when you save or walk away.

What A Form Is Here

A form is one screen for one record. It shows a set of fields, you fill them in, you press Save, and the record is written in a single step.

Two things follow from that, and they surprise people:

• There is no wizard. Nothing walks you through numbered steps with Next and Back buttons. Even where a form is split into tabs, all the tabs belong to the same single save.
• There is no draft and no autosave. Nothing you type is stored anywhere until you press Save. If the form disappears before you save, the typing is gone.

Forms appear in one of two places, and which one you get depends on how you opened the record:

Most of the time you get the pop-up panel. See Pop-Up Windows for how the panel itself works — expanding it, stacking several of them, and closing it.

Starting A New Record

There is more than one way in, and the way in matters: it decides which fields are already filled for you.

From The Add Button On A List

Every list screen can carry an add button in the strip of buttons above the rows, with a plus sign after its wording. Where exactly that strip sits is part of how the list was laid out. Unless your administrator renamed the button, its wording is generic — "new item". Clicking it opens an empty create form for the kind of record that list shows.

The button only appears if your administrator switched it on for that list and your role is allowed to create that kind of record. If a colleague has it and you do not, that is the reason. See Why Your Screen Differs.

From Inside A Record

Open a record and look to the left of its row of tabs. If a plus button is there, clicking it opens a small menu headed "Add related" with one entry per kind of record you can create from here — inside a project you might see New Task and New Invoice.

This is not the same as the add button on a list. Starting here tells the application which record you came from, and it uses that.

From A Field That Points At Another Record

When a field on a form asks you to pick another record — a Customer field on an order, an Assignee field on a task — a small "Create" link with a plus sign usually sits underneath it. It opens a second form on top of the one you are filling in. Save that one and it closes, the new record is selected in the field you started from, and you carry on where you left off.

The link is there by default, but only if your role may create that kind of record and you are not on a public page.

From A Copy Of An Existing Record

Right-clicking a row in a table can offer "Duplicate". That opens a create form already filled with the original record's values, so you can change what differs and save it as a new record. Nothing is written until you save.

From A Calendar Slot Or A Board Column

Calendar and board layouts can start a record from where you clicked — a day in the calendar, a column on a board — which pre-fills the date or the status accordingly. Those two layouts are covered in Calendars and Boards.

Where You Started From Fills Fields In For You

When you create a record from inside another record, the application copies the context down into the new form. Two things happen:

1. Any field on the new record that points back at the record you came from is filled in with it.
2. Any field on the new record that matches something the parent record itself points at is filled in too — the chain is followed upward, not only one step.

Fields filled this way are usually locked, so you cannot accidentally point the new record somewhere else. See Fields You Cannot Change below.

Example You open project Riverside Fit-Out and use the plus button next to its tabs to add a Task. The task form opens with Project already set to Riverside Fit-Out and locked. Because the project itself points at customer Northgate Retail, and the task also has a Customer field, Customer comes through filled in as well — even though you never told the form about the customer. If you had instead used the add button on the general Tasks list, both boxes would have been empty and you would have had to pick them yourself.

The list you started from can also carry default values that your administrator configured — a Status of New, an Owner of you, a folder assignment. Those are ordinary starting values you may change, unless they are locked.

Opening An Existing Record For Editing

You reach the edit form from:

• the Edit entry in the right-click menu on a table row — the chevron at the start of the row opens the same menu without right-clicking,
• the three-dots button that appears on a card when you hover over it,
• an edit button on the record's detail screen, where your administrator put one.

The edit form always edits one record. There is no form that edits several records at once. To change one field across many records at a time, use the right-click quick-edit menu described in Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

The add form and the edit form can be laid out differently and can show different fields: a field may be set to appear only when adding, or only when editing. A form that looked one way when you created the record may look different when you come back to change it. That is configuration, not a fault.

The Anatomy Of A Form

Groups And Section Headings

If your administrator has grouped the fields, the form is broken into blocks. Each block has a heading in the accent color and holds the fields that belong together — Contact details, Billing, Internal notes. Depending on the setup, the blocks either sit one under another down the page (sometimes two side by side, if they were given a narrower width), or they become tabs across the top.

Inside a pop-up panel, group headings and the tab bar stay pinned at the top while you scroll, so you can always see which part of the form you are in.

Two more things you may notice:

• An unlabeled block at the very top or the very bottom. Administrators can pin a few fields above everything else, or below everything else. On a tabbed form the bottom block sits under the tab area and is visible whatever tab you are on.
• A group called "Others". Any field that was never assigned to a group collects here, as the last block or the last tab. It is a catch-all, not a meaningful category.

If no groups were ever configured, the form is a single flat list of fields with the Save button underneath. That is the normal starting state for a new kind of record.

Separately from groups, a form can contain section heading fields: a line of larger text used purely as a divider. It has no box next to it and stores nothing.

Help Text

Two kinds of explanatory text can appear:

• Under a field, in small muted type: the field's own description. This is the place to look when you are unsure what a box wants.
• At the top of a group, in a soft tinted panel: an introduction to that whole block.

Both are written by your administrator, so their presence and their usefulness varies. If a field regularly confuses your team, asking for a description to be added is a small, cheap request.

Labels

The label sits above the box by default. Your administrator can switch the whole application to put labels in a column to the left of the boxes instead; that is a single application-wide choice, not something you set.

A field's label is configurable and often differs from what the field is called elsewhere in the application, so the same underlying information can be called Client on one screen and Customer on another.

Required Fields

Required fields are not marked. There is no asterisk, no color, no "required" note — a mandatory field looks exactly like an optional one. You find out which fields are mandatory by trying to save.

That is worth knowing rather than fighting. Two practical consequences:

• On an unfamiliar form, fill in everything you reasonably can before pressing Save, rather than saving early to see what sticks.
• If your team keeps getting caught by the same box, ask for the word "required" to be added to that field's label or description. That is the only way it can be signposted.

A field can be required when adding but optional when editing, or the reverse. And because a colleague with a different role may see a different set of fields, they can face a different set of mandatory boxes on the same screen.

When a required field is empty, the message under it reads "This field is required." unless your administrator wrote a more specific one.

Saving A Record That Is Not Finished

Some applications offer an extra entry in the right-click menu called "Edit (ignore required)". It opens the same edit form with every mandatory rule switched off, so you can save a half-finished record and come back to it.

It is the closest thing to a draft that exists, and it is not on by default — whether you see it depends on your role and on how that kind of record was set up. Use it deliberately: a record saved this way is a real, live record that other people and other screens will see, incomplete as it is.

How The Application Checks What You Typed

While You Are Filling It In

Checking happens when you leave a field, not while you type. Click into a box, type anything at all, then click or Tab away — that is the moment the field is judged.

• A field that fails turns red, with the reason in red text directly underneath it.
• A field that passes turns green, if it had a rule to pass in the first place.
• Typing again clears the red message right away; it comes back, or does not, when you leave the field again.

When You Press Save

Everything is checked again, all at once. If anything is wrong:

• The form is not sent at all. Nothing reaches the server, nothing is written, nothing is half-saved.
• Every offending field turns red at the same time, not only the first one.
• The cursor jumps into the first offending field.

There is no summary box at the top of the form listing the problems. The red fields are the whole message. On a long one-page form that is often missed, because the offending field can sit well above or below the part of the form you are looking at. If pressing Save appears to do nothing, scroll the whole form from top to bottom looking for red.

Common messages and what they mean:

A handful of technical messages ("Please enter a valid integer.", "Please enter a valid email address.") stay in English even when the rest of your application is in another language.

Errors On A Tab You Cannot See

On a tabbed form, a required field on a tab you never opened still counts. When you press Save the form switches by itself to the first tab that contains an error, so in the ordinary case you are taken straight there.

Do not rely on it completely. If Save seems to refuse without showing you anything, or if the form goes oddly blank after a failed save, click through every tab and look for red boxes — the automatic jump does not cover fields that sit outside the tab area, such as those pinned above or below it.

Errors The Server Sends Back

Some checks can only be made after the form is sent — a duplicate value, a rule that depends on other records. Then the form does reach the server, comes back with red fields, and a message strip appears at the bottom right reading "Some fields are incorrect. Please revise the form." The pop-up panel stays open with everything you typed still in it. Correct the red fields and save again.

These message strips disappear on their own after about five seconds and are not kept anywhere, so read them when they appear.

Tabbed Forms

When a form has tabs, each tab is one group of fields. Points to keep in mind:

• Switching tabs is instant and costs nothing. It is not a page load, no data is sent, and nothing you have typed is lost by moving between tabs.
• One Save covers all tabs. The Save button sits below the tab area and belongs to the whole form. Everything you typed on every tab is written together, in one go. There is no per-tab save and no partial save.
• The tab bar never wraps. With many tabs the later ones sit off the right edge and the bar scrolls sideways. If a form seems to be missing a section, scroll the tab strip.
• The application remembers which tab you were on when the form reloads itself (see the next section), so you are not thrown back to the first tab every time.
• A tab can disappear while you work. If every field in a group becomes irrelevant because of something you chose elsewhere, that whole tab is removed from the form. It comes back if you change the choice back.

If someone describes this layout to you as a wizard, it is still the same tabbed form — there are no steps, no Next button, and no step-by-step validation.

Record detail screens have tabs too, and those behave differently: they load their content when clicked, with a visible pause. See Record Detail Screens.

When The Form Reloads Itself

This is the single most confusing thing forms do, and it is worth understanding properly.

What Is Happening

Some fields are wired up so that changing them rebuilds part of the form. The application has to go back to the server to do it, because the answer to "which fields apply now" and "what belongs in this dropdown now" depends on data it holds, not on anything the browser knows.

Typical reasons a field is wired this way:

• A dependent list. Choosing a country decides which regions can be offered. Choosing a customer decides which of that customer's sites can be offered.
• A branch in the form. Choosing a request type of Hardware reveals asset fields; choosing Access reveals system and permission fields instead.
• A calculation shown back to you. Choosing a price band changes a calculated total further down.

Only fields your administrator explicitly wired do this. Most fields do not, and a form with no such fields never reloads at all.

What You See

1. A moment's pause. A thin colored progress bar runs across the top of the panel and a faint film covers it. The pointer becomes a wait cursor and clicks inside the panel do nothing — including on the panel's own close button.
2. The form is replaced. The whole field area is drawn again. Fields may appear, disappear, or change position. Dropdowns may now hold a different set of choices.
3. The cursor is no longer anywhere. Keyboard focus is lost; you have to click into the next box yourself.
4. Fancier controls flicker. Searchable dropdowns, rich-text editors, date pickers and file uploaders are torn down and rebuilt, so for a fraction of a second they look like plain boxes.
5. Some values may be gone. See below.

Everything you typed elsewhere on the form is carried through the reload — it is sent along and put back. Everything, that is, except values that no longer make sense.

What Sets The Reload Off

• A dropdown triggers the reload the instant you pick something.
• A text box triggers it when you leave the box — click elsewhere, or press Tab. Not while you type.
• A date or time box also triggers it when you leave the box, deliberately, so it does not fire once per digit as you fill in the day, month and year.

Why A Field You Filled In Goes Blank

Three separate things can empty a box during a reload, and they are all deliberate:

• The choice is no longer offered. You had picked region Bavaria; you then changed the country to France; Bavaria is not in the French list, so the region box comes back empty. You must pick again.
• The field no longer applies. A field that only shows for request type Hardware is removed from the form when you switch the type to Access. What you had typed in it goes with it.
• A different default now applies. A field can be set up to take its starting value from another field. Change that other field and the default is worked out again.

There is a sting in the second one: a value hidden by your choices is erased from the record when you save, not merely hidden. If you fill in a field, then change something that hides it, then save, the earlier value is wiped — including a value that had been sitting on the record for months.

Example A support ticket has a Category field. When Category is Hardware, a Serial Number field appears. A ticket was raised last week as Hardware with serial NB-44120 recorded. Today you reclassify it as Software. The Serial Number box vanishes from the form. You press Save. NB-44120 is now gone from the record — not hidden, gone. Switching the category back to Hardware gives you an empty Serial Number box. If a value like that might be needed later, copy it somewhere before you change the field that hides it.

Practical Habits

1. Let it settle before typing on. After changing a field that reloads the form, wait for the progress bar to finish and the form to redraw. Typing into a box while a reload is in flight is wasted effort — that box is about to be replaced, and your keystrokes go with the old one.
2. Re-check everything below the field you changed. The reload is silent about what it altered. Scroll down and look before you save.
3. Fill the form roughly top to bottom. The fields that steer the rest are almost always near the top. Choosing the type, the country or the customer first saves you from having your later answers cleared.
4. If the first click on Save seems to do nothing, wait and click again. When you type into a reload-triggering text box and go straight for Save, leaving the box fires the reload first, and your click lands on a form that is being replaced. Nothing was saved twice — nothing was saved at all the first time. Let the redraw finish, then press Save.
5. If fields stop reacting entirely, close the form and reopen it. If a reload is interrupted — you pressed Esc, or the connection dropped — the form can quietly stop responding to further changes, with no message. Reopening the pop-up, or reloading the page for a full-page form, restores it. Anything unsaved is lost, so if the record is already valid, save first and then reopen.

Dropdowns That Change Without A Reload

A searchable picker that points at another record can also change its contents without any visible reload at all. Some pickers fetch their list of choices at the moment you open it, taking the record you are editing into account. So a picker that was empty or short earlier may be full of choices once you have filled in the field it depends on — with nothing on screen to announce it. If a picker looks empty, fill in the fields above it first and open it again.

Conditional Fields

Beyond the reload mechanism, fields can be set to appear only in certain circumstances: only for records in a certain state, only for certain roles, only when another field has a certain value.

From your seat, a conditional field is either present or absent. There is no grayed-out placeholder and no note saying a field exists but does not apply. This means:

• A field a colleague mentions may genuinely not be on your form. Either the condition is not met for this record, or your role does not include it.
• A field can appear halfway through filling the form in — that is the reload doing its job.
• A broken condition hides the field silently. If a rule cannot be worked out, the application treats it as "do not show", with no error. So a field that has vanished for everybody, on every record, is worth reporting rather than working around.

Fields You Cannot Change

Four different situations leave you unable to change a value, and they mean different things.

The key distinction is the third row: a field you are not allowed to change is not shown grayed out — it is missing from the form altogether. People often read that as a fault in the application. It is not; it is your permissions.

One related case: password boxes always look empty. A password field is drawn blank even when a password is set. Leaving it empty keeps the existing password; typing in it replaces it.

If a form opens with no Save button and no fields, that is not a broken screen either: it means there is nothing on that record your role may edit.

Saving

The Buttons

At the bottom of the form there is one large primary button, "Save". On a create form it carries a plus icon before the word; on an edit form an arrow after it. There is no "Save and new" and no "Save and continue".

There is no Cancel button on a create or edit form. To abandon it, close the pop-up panel — with its close button at the top right, by clicking on the page behind it, or by pressing Esc. Delete forms are the exception: they have their own Delete button, and in a pop-up panel a Cancel link sits beside it. They are covered in Deleting Records And The Trash.

What Happens When It Works

1. A green message strip appears at the bottom right: "Record created." or "Record updated." It fades after about five seconds and is not stored anywhere.
2. The pop-up panel closes by itself.
3. The screen behind refreshes. Lists redraw with your change in place; the record card behind updates.

That third step has a limit worth knowing: purpose-built dashboard-style pages only refresh the parts your administrator marked for refreshing. If a total or a chart behind the panel still shows the old figure after you saved, it is stale display, not a lost save — reload the page with F5 to confirm. The same applies to any list open in a browser tab you were not working in.

On a full-page form there is no panel to close. You get the message strip, and depending on how you arrived you may be sent back to the page you came from after a short pause.

What Happens When It Fails

• Something you typed was rejected. Red fields, the message strip "Some fields are incorrect. Please revise the form.", the panel stays open with your work intact.
• Something went wrong while writing. A message strip beginning "Error creating the record." or "Error updating the record." followed by a technical explanation. Nothing was written — the record is exactly as it was. The technical part of that message is meant for your administrator; copy it into your report rather than trying to interpret it.
• A rule stopped the save deliberately. Applications can be set up to block a save under certain conditions, in which case you may see a specific message written by your administrator explaining why — or, if none was written, nothing at all: the panel stays open, no confirmation appears, and the record is unchanged. That silent case is worth reporting.
• The request failed outright. A dialog headed "Error When Processing Request" appears. See When Something Goes Wrong.

Double-Clicking Save

Inside a pop-up panel you are protected: as soon as the form is submitted the panel is covered by a film that swallows further clicks, so a second click cannot get through.

On a full-page form there is no such cover. The Save button is not disabled while the save is running, and a fast double-click can create the record twice. Press Save once and wait for the message strip. If you do end up with two identical records, delete one — see Deleting Records And The Trash.

Two Things That Block Saving

• A file upload in progress. While a file is being uploaded the Save button is disabled and the form refuses to submit. Nothing explains the grayed-out button; the uploader's own progress display is the clue. Wait for the upload to finish. See Uploading Files And Images.
• Esc pressed while saving. Esc both closes the top pop-up and cancels the request in flight. Press it during a save and you cancel your browser's wait — but the server may already have written the record. The safe recovery is to refresh the list and look before you try again.

Unsaved Changes

In A Pop-Up Panel You Are Warned

Once you have changed any field in a panel, trying to close it — by the close button, by clicking outside it, or with Esc — brings up a browser confirmation reading "By closing this modal you may lose unsaved changes. Continue?" Choosing to stay keeps the panel exactly as it was.

The warning is not perfect. It does not appear when:

• the panel is closed by the browser Back button,
• the panel is closed by the application itself after a successful save,
• your session expires and you are sent to the sign-in page.

In all three cases unsaved input in the panel is discarded without a word.

On A Full Page You Are Not Warned At All

Navigating away from a full-page form, reloading it, or closing the browser tab loses everything with no confirmation whatsoever. There is no "are you sure" and no recovery. This is the single most common way people lose work in this application.

The habits that protect you:

• On a long form, save early and edit again. Fill in enough to satisfy the mandatory fields, save, reopen, carry on. Two saves cost nothing.
• Compose long text somewhere else. For anything more than a few sentences, write it in a text editor or a document and paste it in.
• Do not leave a half-filled form open over lunch. If your session expires you are sent to the sign-in page and the form goes with it.

No Drafts, No Autosave, No Undo

• Nothing is saved until you press Save.
• There is no draft state for records. The nearest thing is "Edit (ignore required)", if your application offers it — and a record saved that way is fully live.
• There is no undo anywhere. Once saved, the previous values are replaced. Some applications keep a change log on the record's detail screen, which lets you at least see what a value used to be; see Record Detail Screens.

Two things do save instantly, without any Save button, and are worth knowing so you are not caught out: ticking a checklist item, and quick-edits made from the right-click menu on a list. Those take effect immediately and cannot be undone by closing the form.

When Two People Edit The Same Record

The last save wins, silently. The application does not lock records, does not warn you that someone else has the record open, and does not tell you afterwards that your save replaced theirs.

The part that catches people is that this applies to fields you never touched. When you press Save, the form writes every field it is showing, using the values that were in the boxes when the form was drawn for you. A field you never looked at is still written — with the value it had when you opened the form.

Example At 09:00 Petra opens invoice INV-2041 to correct a typo in the Note. She reads a phone call and leaves the panel open. At 09:10 Marek opens the same invoice, changes the Due Date from 30 June to 15 July, and saves. The record now has the new due date. At 09:25 Petra fixes the typo and saves. Her form still held the old due date of 30 June, because that is what it showed when she opened it at 09:00. Her save writes 30 June back. Marek's change is gone. Nobody is told. Marek finds out when the invoice chases a customer two weeks early.

The habits that avoid it:

• Open the edit form when you are ready to type, not while you are thinking about it. A form left open is a snapshot growing staler by the minute.
• Save promptly and close. Do not leave an edit panel open in the background.
• If a form has been open a while, close it without saving, reopen it, and redo your change. Reopening costs a few seconds; overwriting a colleague costs a great deal more.
• For records several people work on at once, agree who edits what, or use comments to hand over. See Comments And Mentions.

Worked Example: Creating A Customer

The Sales list has an add button at the top right. Here is a full pass through a form that has a required VAT number and a region that depends on the country.

1. Open the form. Click the add button above the customer list. A panel slides in from the right, headed New Customer. It has three tabs: Basics, Address, Others.

2. Fill in the Basics tab. Company name, contact email, an account manager picked from a dropdown. You type the email badly at first — anna@nortgate — and when you Tab out of the box it turns red with a message about a valid email address. You correct it to anna@northgate.example and Tab out again; the red goes and the box turns green.

3. Move to the Address tab. Nothing you typed on Basics is affected; switching tabs is instant.

4. Choose the country. You pick Germany from the Country dropdown. Immediately a thin progress bar runs across the top of the panel and the panel dims for a moment. The form redraws. The Region dropdown, which was empty and unusable before, now offers German federal states. A VAT number field has also appeared, because it only applies to countries inside the EU.

5. Pick the region. Bavaria.

6. Realize the country was wrong. The head office is in Austria, not Germany. You change Country to Austria. The panel dims again and the form redraws. This time:

   • the Region dropdown comes back empty — Bavaria is not an Austrian region, so the value was dropped;
   • the VAT number field is still there, because Austria is in the EU too;
   • the cursor is nowhere, so you click into Region and pick Vienna.

7. Leave the VAT number empty and press Save. Nothing is sent. The form jumps to the tab holding the error — you are already on it — and the VAT box is red with "This field is required." underneath. It was never marked as mandatory before you tried; that is normal.

8. Fill in the VAT number and press Save again. The panel closes. A green strip at the bottom right reads "Record created." The customer list behind you redraws with the new row in it.

9. A colleague asks why the German site is not on the record. Because you changed Country before saving, nothing about Germany was ever written — the record only ever existed once, at the moment of that final Save.

Tips And Gotchas

• Required fields are invisible until you try to save. Fill in everything you can, then save.
• A field you cannot edit is missing, not grayed out. Absence is the normal way permissions show themselves.
• The reload wipes values that no longer apply — including values already stored on the record. Copy anything you might need before changing a field that hides others.
• The first Save click after typing into a reload-triggering box can be swallowed. Let the redraw finish and click again.
• Esc does two things at once: it closes the top pop-up and cancels the request in flight. Avoid it while a save is running.
• The browser Back button closes a pop-up without the unsaved-changes warning.
• Full-page forms give no warning at all when you navigate away or close the tab.
• A dropdown you never touched can still save a value. An optional single-choice dropdown that offers no blank entry falls back to its first option when the form is saved. If a dropdown matters, choose in it deliberately.
• A form with many tabs hides the later ones off the right edge — scroll the tab strip before concluding a section is missing.
• Message strips vanish after about five seconds and are not kept. Read them when they appear.
• On a slow connection, rich controls arrive late. A searchable dropdown or rich-text box may briefly be a plain box, and only becomes searchable or formattable once it has finished loading. Wait a beat on the first form you open in a session.
• Deleting a record from the delete form is usually permanent. See Deleting Records And The Trash.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

Nothing on a form is something you can change yourself. These are the requests worth making, phrased so they can be acted on:

• "Please mark Field X as required in its label or description — nothing on screen tells us it is mandatory."
• "Please add a description under Field X explaining what we should put in it."
• "Please group the fields on the X form — it is one long list and people miss the bottom of it."
• "Please give Field X a clearer label; it is called something different on the list screen."
• "Please give me the Edit (ignore required) action on X records so I can save a partial record and finish later."
• "Please make Field Y's options depend on Field X — we keep picking combinations that do not exist."
• "Field X disappeared from every Y record for everybody. Can you check its show condition?"
• "I can see Field X on the record but there is no box for it when I edit. Can my role be allowed to change it?"
• "The panel for X records is too narrow for this form. Can it open in the large size by default?"

For what any individual kind of field expects and how it behaves once you are typing in it, see The Fields You Will Meet.

Related Chapters

• Record Detail Screens
• The Fields You Will Meet
• Pop-Up Windows
• Uploading Files And Images
• Deleting Records And The Trash