The submission form is one of the most important aspects to get right when configuring your program. The OpenWater form builder is robust and has many different features. You can create multi-page forms, move fields between pages, and setup conditional logic branching, which we call dependent fields.

Before you get started, you should learn how to access your submission form so that you can test it out while you build it.
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To setup your submission form, first navigate to your program.

Under the Round Settings drop down menu, click Submission Form.
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If you find that your submission form asks many questions, it might make sense to break the form up into smaller chunks. Our default template provides you with two pages to start off with -- typically a Contact Information page followed by the Submission Information page.

You can add a new page to the form by clicking Add Question Page.

Pages are setup as breadcrumbs to the end user. The applicant can also tab between the pages by clicking on the breadcrumb item.

If you accidentally add a field to the wrong page, that's okay! You can use the Move Fields button to move fields between pages.

And lastly, you can swap the order of pages by grabbing the crosshair to the left of the page name in the list.

You can also delete entire pages by clicking Delete on the right side.

Let's actually change some form fields around by clicking Select on the name of the page for which we want to add fields to.

The next screen will show a preview. Proceed to the form builder by clicking Edit Form Fields.
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By default OpenWater places two fields that cannot be removed from the submission form. They are the known as the Application Field and the Category Fields respectively. The Category Field will automatically populate with the categories you previously configured. The Application Field should be a field of your choice that represents the title of the submission. Often this is a project title, or if you are nominating a person, it is the name of nominee. Learn more about the importance of the application and category fields.

To add fields to the submission form, click on a field of your choice from the left side of the form builder panel.

Click on the field you just added and the Field Settings menu will appear for that field. Each field type has a common set of options and another set that might be specific for that field type.

Field Label - set the name of the field. This name will also appear as the column name in excel report outputs.

Details - This is useful for instructional text to the applicant. Click Turn on Rich Text Mode if you want to stylize the instructional text.

Make Field Required - Check the Is this field required? box to force the applicants to enter a value for the field.
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Hide Field from Applicant - Check this box if you want to create a field for admin note purposes or for internal use.

Hide Field from Judge - This setting is most commonly used to blind fields from judges or to hide fields judges do not need to be bothered with viewing.

Lock options for Checkbox, Radio, and Dropdown fields - Disable one or more option by locking them:

Toggle these options as required for your program. This is helpful if you want to only allow a certain number of applicants to select a value. Once you've reached your cap you can disable that item.

Edit the list of items by clicking on the options menu to access the Add Item or Delete Item options

You might find that you need to create the same field over and over again, just slightly different. OpenWater makes this easy for you with our clone feature. Click the copy icon to the right of the field.

Delete fields entirely from the submission form by clicking the trash icon to right.
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It is common and recommended to include fields for contact information for the person submitting the form. You can save the applicant time by pre-populating these fields automatically by pulling the information from their User Profile. You can achieve this by placing User Profile Fields on the form.

Often times you may want to ask a set of questions that depend on the previous answer from the applicant. You can do this with the radio field, the drop down field, and the checkbox field.

With a radio, drop down, or checkbox field, you can set your option values. Each option value will have a 'link' icon to the left that you can click. Another form builder will appear and you can create your new set of questions. You can even chain these dependent fields and go down a tree of questions.

To the end user, it functions like this:

Depending on your program, you may ask different questions to the applicant depending on which category they select. This involves the use of an advanced feature called Category Groups.