What is AEM Forms

 

AEM Forms

AEM Forms is in huge demand in market now a days. The first should come in our mind what are AEM Forms? And why we have different section for AEM Forms?

The answer will be as you know Adobe provides us different-2 service like 

Apart from Sites and Assets we have one important section that is known as Forms. This section is used to create Interactive and Adaptive forms.

The question here is why we have different section for forms?

We were having form component earlier with the foundation component. And now a days we have form components with core components.

If you are not aware about the foundation and core components so you can assume that both core/foundation components are OOTB(Out Of The Box) components present in AEM. These are the readymade and production ready component. We can directly use these components in our sites/forms. The foundation components are deprecated in AEM 6.5 and AEM CAAS(Cloud as a service). Now a days we are using the core components.

So again question is why do we need a specific section even though we are having form component present. 

For example we have form or forms components present in the sites. We can have Text, Texfields, Dropdown, Radio Button, Button and many more things those we can use inside the forms. But the forms component are now a days are pretty interactive. Websites uses these forms to communicate to their users. We can not create the enrich forms by OTTB forms component.

Disadvantages with Form Components in Sites:

• Maintaining these forms are very difficult. Let us suppose we have 1000 forms in a website so it will be very difficult to maintain those 1000 forms in a website.
• And if we want to integrate Forms in website with third parties than we have to write the custom code.
• In case of form component present in the site so each client can implement the forms by it's own way. In a way there is no standard approach to do it other than the form component you have.
• For example if you are using form component and you have requirement to complete integrate it with RDBMS like MySQL so we need to write the code to integrate it. And in case if we have requirement to integrate it with Oracle So we need to write the code for same as well. To solve this kind of issues the agent came with specific section called AEM Forms Or Adaptive Forms.

Advantages with AEM Forms

• Most of the functionalities are available here you will just configure and done. You no need to write the custom code here.
• There are enrich component available for form.
• We have number of component to work with the form.
• We have standard way to define Themes.
• We have standard way to define Template.
• We have standard way to define the submit handlers with different-different data sources.
• We can configure Rest, Soap Services and others as well.

AEM Forms

• Using AEM forms you can create different forms access centralized place.
• It is a centralized form portal to design and deploying the AEM Forms like HTML5,PDF and Adaptive Forms.
• An easy to use Graphical User Interface to let business user easily import, manage, preview and Publish Form.
• A responsive form directory with powerful search features using keyword, tags and metadata.
• A dynamic detection of user's device and location to render the form appropriately across web and mobile channels.
• Integration with Adobe Analytics to effectively measure form usage metrics.
• Integration with Adobe Document cloud eSign services or Scribble to electronically sign the document containing confidential information.
• Automated form publishing capabilities and the ability to deliver timely, personalized and consistent communication through multiple channels.

Adobe Experience Manager provides and easy to use solution to create, manage, publish and update complex digital forms while integrating it with backend processes, business rules and data.

AEM form combines form authoring, management and publishing along with correspondence management capabilities and integrated analytics to create engaging end to end experience. Designed to work across web and mobile channel. AEM forms can easily integrated into your business processes, reducing paper processes and error while improving efficiency.

AEM Forms' Type

At a high level we have three type of forms as shown.

1)PDF Form.

2)HTML Form.

3)Adaptive Form.

1)PDF Form:-PDF Form are offline forms. We will have a pdf in our machine we can fill it and upload it to the portal and at last data will sync to the server or when you will be online data will submit to the server. It was first version of AEM Forms. We can also use the Digital Signature the validate the authenticity of user.

2)HTML Form:-These forms are HTML 5 based forms. These forms work pretty well with all you devices. You can render these forms in any kind of devices. You can use any eSign services or Scribble  to sign these forms.

3)Adaptive Forms:-Adaptive forms can adapt to the user response. We can create these forms by using number of ways. 

AEM Forms Setup

• This AEM form setup is not available with plain vanilla instance. We can see the Forms icon but we will not be able to create the form here.

• To create the form we need to download the Forms' add on package from package share or from software distribution portal. And it will be operating system dependent. Means if we are using windows OS than we have download for windows.

We will discus about the installation in next blog.

Thanks
Karan Aggarwal
AEM Technical Lead
karanaggarwal9696@gmail.com
+9170182-45189