Industries / Applications: Fabrication, Quality Assurance, Submitting forms for customer approval
There is a form that we complete for each contract, that details what users must inspect and requires them to sign off on the specifications being met. Most fields in each screen are read only, as we do not want users to edit what the acceptance criteria are. The only fields that are not read only are the inspector signature, and the customer signature.
I would like to be able to export a preview of this form to submit this inspection test plan to the customer for approval (this occurs for each job and each form created will be distinct for each job). Currently, how I do this is by making all signatures not required (this is a tedious process as there are 2 signature fields per screen and up to about 40 screens) and then submitting a blank form and using that PDF, but would like to either have better options in the PDF previewer in the PDF designer, or be able to turn off all required fields at once, possibly in the General Settings.
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Hi Jacob,
Thanks for your feedback. I want to make sure I understand what the goal here is, so that we can brainstorm some possible solutions. What you're need is to be able to show a PDF that has values specific to the customer entered for them to review before signing. Then they agree, sign, and you're able to proceed - does that sound right?
A couple of similar requests exist that might get at that ability, particularly this one about previewing the PDF before sync: https://help.gocanvas.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360006758594-View-PDF-Print-Preview-Option. This is something we've heard on regular basis and are considering as a future feature.
One way to maybe get to exactly what you need right now is a little complex, but possibly do-able. Basically, you'd have two Apps. One would capture the field that show what users must inspect (no signatures - just those fields). You'd submit that App in order to generate the PDF for review. Then, you'd use Zapier to populate that those same fields in another App, this one with signature fields.
In a little more detail, that flow would work like this:
Field 1
Field 2
Field 3
Field 1
Field 2
Field 3
Signature 1
Signature 2
Checkbox field: This contract has not been approved to proceed.
Does that make sense/help at all?
Thanks!
Hi Sara,
I believe I understand the general flow of this solution, but will still end up with a somewhat tedious problem. It appears that I will need to make two forms for each job that we get, some with signatures and some without. For small apps I can see that this would represent a relatively small amount of time, but for these forms that get sent to the customer, the app can be up to forty screens long. I looked at the feature request that you linked, and believe they are experiencing a similar issue. Looking at the comments, it appears that a lot of users' difficulties would be relieved if there were some other options on the PDF preview when you create the app, such as not autopopulating with "<field name> Value", but instead leaving app-designer input data. For most of our fields, when the quality engineer creates the app he will fill these in as a read-only, as that is all the information the customer will sign off on, and then all the information the inspector will use when inspecting the components. Thanks for the help, please let me know if you think of any other solution that could potentially work more quickly.