Ever have a need for collecting “before and after” photos and data?
One of our customers does. Their use case is as follows:
- Enter a room in a building
- Record the room #, take photos and jot down observations
- Perform what they were hired to do in that room
- Come back into the room, take more photos and observations
- Send report to their customer documenting the room before they performed their work, and after they performed their work
They do the above as a way to provide proof to their customer that indeed they did what they said they did.
Easy setup
This sort of use case is really easy to set up in XForms:
- Create your form template in the Designer
- Create a form section for the BEFORE info
- Create a form section for the AFTER info
- Alternatively, you can create before fields and after fields in the same section
Here’s a really simple example of this:
How to use “Before and After” forms in the field
This might be obvious, but it merits mentioning: Once you have created your form template as described above, have your field teams use it as follows:
- Start a form as usual, and fill out the “Before” information
- Tap on the “Save” button on the bottom right of the screen and then on “Save Draft” in the popup menu
- Put your device away, perform the work you were hired to do
- Open your device, find your draft form, tap on it, and fill out the “After” information
- Now tap on the Save button and then on :”Submit”
By saving it as a “draft” form, all the required fields will be bypassed (meaning you can leave these blank), and the form will display a tiny “Draft” tag on it in the mobile app’s dashboard screen.
Here’s a gif to illustrate this:
Dashboard access
Once your field techs submit their “before and after” forms, you can view them as usual. To view forms still in Draft mode, flip the switch on the Forms screen.
From the Forms screen in the reporting dashboard, you can then view the photos and PDF. The draft version of the form will display a “DRAFT” watermark.
Also runs in offline mode
Note that all of this also works in offline mode. Just make sure you first tap on “Sync Offline Data” while you have internet connectivity before you flip the app to offline mode.
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