For Community and Group Editions
Using special case tags in eForms to populate a fillable PDF
Sometimes you may need to print student information onto pre-printed forms. Operoo now lets you do this using special case tags and a fillable PDF.
Information is collected using a customised eForm with a Special Case Tag and automatically populates a fillable PDF version of the form.
There are 5 parts to using this feature:
Create an eForm
Create fillable fields in your PDF
Add a special case tag to an eForm
Add Question Name Identifiers (QNI) to your eForm
Downloading PDFs with answers
1. Create eForm
Create an eForm with the questions that need to be shown in the PDF
2. Creating fillable fields in your PDF
Most PDF editing software work the same way. Using any PDF editing tools, open your PDF form and add field names to every field that needs to be populated with data from eForms.
The example here is from PDFfiller.com
a. Choose field type "Text"
b. Place the field onto the PDF form where you want the answer to be shown
c. Give the field a name. This name will be used as the QNI on the eForm.
d. Repeat the above steps for every field that needs to be printed onto the PDF.
IMPORTANT: Database field names in the PDF must be in lower case
e. Save your PDF as a "Fillable PDF" and download the PDF to your desktop.
3. Add a special case tags to your eForm
Special case tags are used to link your eForm with the fillable PDF you created.
a. Log in to Operoo Support section
b. Click on "Add Special Case Tag to eForm"
c. Find the eForm you created in Step 1 by using the Organisation ID.
• add a special case tag
• Click Change to Save
• Once you save the special case tag, it will be shown in the list of special case tag
4. Add Question Name Identifiers (QNI) to your eForm
Once you've created the special case tag, open the eForm.
A Special Case Tag section is added to the eForm
“See all required question identifiers” shows all fields on the fillable PDF
“Test identifier usage” shows you all missing QNIs on the eForm
All questions on the eForm will now have an area where you need to fill in the QNI
Using the fillable PDF as a reference, type in the QNI for all questions
All QNIs added must match the PDF field names exactly
After creating all QNIs, click Save to save the eForm
5. Downloading PDFs with answers
There are two ways to download PDFs with eForm answers.
Download PDF for an individual student
When any user completes an eForm containing a special case tag, an icon will appear on their profile image.
Administrators can click this icon to download the PDF with all answered questions appearing on the PDF.
Download PDF for all students
Administrators can also download PDFs for every student.
Here’s how:
go to the Form Library
Select the eForm
Select Export>Export Responses for Mapped PDF
Field Types
Text
This is the most common field type to use
Radio Button
Radio buttons are used when a question has multiple possible answers but only one answer can be chosen.
Map each possible answer to the respective answer in the PDF
Checkbox buttons are used when a question has multiple possible answers and multiple answers can be chosen
PDF Mapping Field Name suffixes
Suffixes are used to cater for answers where we might need to manipulate what is shown in the PDF. To do this, we need to use double underscores __ after the QNI field name to specify what is shown.
Signatures
QNI__signature (show the signature image)
Use a Text field type when creating your fillable PDF
Eg. On an eForm we collect the parent’s signature. The QNI for a parent’s signature might be parent_signature however, on the PDF field mapping we need to use
parent_signature__signature to display the signature in the PDF
Dates
QNI__date_day (show the day of the date value)
QNI__date_month (show the month of the date value)
QNI__date_year (show the year of the date value)
Eg. On an eForm we collect the student’s birthdate of "01 Feb 2020".
To separate the different components of the date we do the following:
student_birth_date__date_day will show the birth “day” in the PDF
student_birth_date__date_month will show the birth “month” in the PDF
student_birth_date__date_year will show the birth “year” in the PDF
Splitting number and text (Used in forms that separate each character)
QNI__split_01
QNI__split_02
QNI__split_03
etc.
Sometimes text/numbers on a PDF form are separated by boxes.
The text/number is collected in a single textbox on an eForm with a single QNI.
However, on the PDF the number might need to be split into individual digits.
Example, we collect an insurance membership number '9132423' with the QNI insurance_number.
To display each digit in the PDF in their correct box, we need to split the field value as follows:
insurance_number__split01 (shows the first digit, '9'. Map this into the first box in pdfFiller)
insurance_number__split02 (shows the second digit, '1'. Map this into the second box in pdfFiller)
insurance_number__split03 (shows the third digit, '3'. Map this into the third box in pdfFiller)
Multi-select questions (A question with more than one answer selected)
QNI__select_answer
This is only used for questions that have multiple answers.
Note: 'answer' must match the question wording on the eForm
eg. on an eForm the QNI is device_type and there are 3 multi-select answers:
“Apple Mac”
“Windows Computer”
“iPhone/iPad”
on PDF template, I will have 3 checkbox database fields:
“device_type__select_apple mac”
“device_type__select_windows computer”
“device_type__select_iPhone/iPad”
