IEG4’s Low Code eForms Designer (eDesigner) with Local Government as a Platform (LGaaP) enables business-users to build and deploy intelligent online forms rapidly, add custom-built rules and integration to existing systems, and connect online forms to payment systems without code (No Code). Access to a library of 250+ forms and membership of the eDesigner forms community (LGaaP) comes with the product and created forms can be shared between authorities.

Not only do all councils do the same things, more or less, but it is also true that all departments in all councils do those same things. In any one council, there may be dozens of departments, and there are hundreds of local authorities. And they may be all doing things slightly differently, all with their own systems and software – an approach which might, if we were being kind, be described as, at the very least, inefficient.

Back in 2015, the director of the London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI) Eddie Copeland, then working for the Policy Exchange, imagined a scenario where local authorities would no longer design and/or buy their own online services – because those software services were essentially doing the same ‘things’ (see above) as in every other local authority. Instead, software services would be available in an ‘app store’, having been created by different organisations, and would be used by ‘dozens or even hundreds’, of local authorities. This would, because of economies of scale, be more efficient (i.e. cost-effective, saving councils money). The ‘store’ Copeland described is available now from IEG4 as a part of subscription to the eDesigner service (LGaaP).

Our approach is that, whilst councils do like to do things their own way, which means there is, inevitably, some reinvention of the wheel going on – it is also true that more and more councils are happy to share. And through IEG4u, IEG4’s citizen portal, they are able to make forms they’ve built for ‘things’ (see above) available for other councils to see, and share.

This means that, from day one, users have access to a library of in excess of 250 forms. So, this really is a ‘Council in a box’ and represents an opportunity for local authorities to make a step change forward with their digital strategies, wherever they are in the journey. This may be to get started on a coherent digital strategy, or to pull a number of disparate departmental approaches together.

Because not only do councils get access to the forms, but also the forms share the same coherence, the same look and feel – making it easier for citizens accessing the council to recognise and navigate through a form. And if citizens find it easier to use online services, then channel shift, digital transformation, really does happen.

IEG4 has an entire library of digital services provides a ‘Council in a box’ represents an opportunity for local authorities to make a step change forward with their digital strategies, wherever they are in the journey.

These come as a part of being licensed to our OneVu or eDesigner services. Content within the online forms can be edited using the built-in text editor. This means that question wording, guidance notes and help text will be editable by individual councils to suit their own needs. This includes the ability to support additional languages e.g. Welsh.

Services/forms are continuously being added to the Local Government as a Platform (LGaaP) store by customers using the eDesigner module and any of the forms in the library can be added to / manipulated with eDesigner (if this is licensed) too. Forms cover all of the following departments with some examples :

• Council Tax (e.g. Request a refund/Report a death/Evidence Upload)

• Benefits (Two Homes Payments/Overpayment Arrangement)

• Bins & Waste (Request an Assisted Collection)

• Business Rates (Summons Payment Arrangement/Evidence Upload)

• Customer Services (COVID – Request Assistance/Comments, Complaints, Feedback)

• Environmental Health (Report Fly Tipping/Report Graffiti)

• Housing (Housing Needs Enquiry/Report Housing Disrepair)

• Human Resources (Job Application/Report Absence)

• Licensing (House of Multiple Occupation Licence application)

• Miscellaneous (Parking Waiver Application/Visiting Team Referral)

• Planning / Building Control (Building Control inspection request/Report planning breach)

• Social Care (Report domestic violence)

List of available LGaaP services

The following is the full list of online forms IEG4 provide and our customers have built. Forms built by customers can be shared across councils to avoid re-inventing the wheel and benefit from a community of users:

Simply make a request through the help desk:

If you've built a new form you think others would be interested in please let us know on the eDesigner Microsoft Teams Board here:

This list of forms also includes the powerful product forms IEG4 provides so as to enable one to understand the vast scale of the library.

The vast majority of forms are available at no charge, however, we do reserve the right to charge for the more complex forms, with 25% of any charge returning to the originating council (in the form of a credit against IEG4 invoices) to recognise the effort that went into these by the council.

In order to facilitate the actual secure trusted instance, we need to create a Form Alias. This can be found in the Forms section of System Management as shown here:

When you click on this you can Create a new form alias (or trusted instance of the form). To create one you need provide a Name, Friendly Name, Description and whether it requires a logon or not. You will likely set this to Yes for all trusted/council access to facilitate a logon which enables the user details to be passed to the back office. Here we can see a Form Alias that has been created for the Credit Union:

So one can see that it is possible to click on the Details option to access the URL for the Alias. This URL is the one that should be provided to either Council staff or the Trusted party in question. I.e. It is possible to set up as many Aliases up as you’d like:

You’ll notice that in the Alias you can see the word Credit Union exists in the URL to reflect that it is an alias of the main form. You can also see that the Alias is restricted and therefore a logon is required. This will be how you would want to set all trusted access i.e. with it set to Y:

Sometimes you want to create a form that is based heavily on another. Cloning a form takes seconds.

Simply open the Form Details page for a form - this will be the one with the URLs for the form.

Click the 'Clone' link:

The system will automatically append the words 'Clone of ....' whatever the original form's name and description was. You can keep this or more likely rename to reflect its purpose:

Once cloned the copy, renamed or otherwise will appear in the form list.

In order to add Govmetric Feedback capture to your forms you simply need to go to the Resources tab of form Management and search (Ctrl + F) for 'Footer'.

When you've found it:

Click on it and copy/paste your script in:

We've now added no-code support for Civica Pay.

The functionality provided enables you to:

• Add a fixed cost payment item control e.g. Black Bin is £35.00

• Add a user entry based payment control e.g. Council Tax payment where the user enters in any amount

• Add a payment summary where the total of all payments in a form are summarised and passed to the payment system i.e. a Shopping Basket

Set Up

CivicaPayTsbBaseUrl

This is the URL end point fo the payment system's URL. eDesigner enables you to build forms that integrate to payment systems without any technical knowledge.

CivicaPayTsbCallingAppIdentifier

This is first of three identifiers for Civica Payment system integration.

CivicaPayTsbCustomerID

This is second of three identifiers for Civica Payment system integration.

CivicaPayTsbCustomerPassword

This is third of three identifiers for Civica Payment system integration.

Adding Payment Items

A payment item is a fixed price item that a person can buy.

If you choose to add a payment item the following options are presented:

The Field Label is what is shown to the customer when buying it in the form.

The Item Catalogue ID is more commonly known as the fund code but its terminology in Civica Pay.

The Item Reference is the specific payment item reference number of the item.

This manifests itself as illustrated below:

You can, of course, use conditional rules to dynamically show which payment items are presented to customers should you have multiple payment items but only one/or a selection of the total is/are relevant based upon circumstances.

On moving to Civica Pay - we can see the details pushed across:

User Entered Payment

A user entered payment control enables the citizen to type in the amount that they wish to pay.

For this option there are a variety of additional fields that relate to controlling what a user entered amount looks like and its label.

I.e. the format of the numbers they can enter is controlled by a regular expression. We'd say keep this as it is as it's the standard format for currency based entry. You can also add validation and mandatory warnings too:

Above we can see that there's also an option for 'User entered reference'. If this is clicked there are the following additional options which provide you with control over what the format of the reference is in terms of:

• Minimum / Maximum Length (E.g. 5 minimum 8 maximum)

• Regular Expression (E.g. must start with a 4 contain 6 or 7 numbers but the final one can be x)

• Failed Validation message to present if the validation rules above are not met

• Mandatory warning text which if present make it mandatory and vice versa removing it makes it optional

If the user types things in wrong you can thus present messages:

Payment Summary

A payment summary automatically tallies up any payment relevant payment items/user entered amounts and acts like a shopping basket.

The only thing required when adding a payment summary is a field id and should you support a different currency (unlikely!) the ability to change the currency symbol:

This is presented like so where two items were requested on earlier pages:

In early 2021, Councils became able to use the Ordnance Survey APIs to search for addresses at no cost.

These APIs are documented here:

Reflective of this, IEG4 has created a no code address look up function that is fully integrated to these APIs and this enables non-technical staff to add an address look up to all of their forms.

To add the address look up it's as easy as adding a section and selecting the address selection per below:

Address Section

The ability to place an address search into forms that is able to search the entirety of the UK.

The default option, now that it is free to councils is 'Ordnance Survey'.

Simply click to save and you've set up an address section, which is capable of integrating with the Ordnance Survey.

Address Lookup Style

There is a setting that controls the style of the address look up. The setting is:

CustomAddressProviders

The two modes available are:

• TypeAheadSearch (this is the default) - set the value within the setting config to "Style":0 i.e. [ { "Enabled":true, "Name":"Ordnance Survey", "Type":"API KEY", "Style":0 } ]

If this option is enabled, as the user types in an address or postcode, it will instantly start searching for addresses.

This provides a smart way of dynamically getting the results as the user enters their address.

• Postcode set the value in the setting config to "Style":1

If this option is selected the customer needs to enter a postcode and then physically click a search button.

Prerequisite

In order that this can be set up by the IEG4 team, we need to have the council's API key for this. This is free to councils now and simply needs you to create an account per below:

.Once you have this simply provide the details to IEG4 support:

This address look up is specific to Hackney Council.

Hackney Council has a RESTful API that is open and combines LLPG/NLPG data to facilitate an address look up. We have modified our eDesigner solution to facilitate the use of this API.

Functionality

To add the address look up to a form navigate to design mode and click 'Add Item':

Add a section as shown here:

Select Address Fields from the list of section types:

Give it a field id, click 'Use address lookup' and select Hackney address lookup as the provider:

Follow these three simple steps and you'll have added an address look up to your form:

API Foibles

1) For some postcodes more than one property with the exact same information is returned. The API should clearly not do this. Example below where the postcode BS5 8DD was used:

api/v1/addresses/?format=simple&postcode=BS58DD

{"line1": "23 ST GEORGES AVENUE","line2": "ST GEORGE","line3": "BRISTOL","line4": "BS5 8DD","town": "BRISTOL","postcode": "BS5 8DD","UPRN": 256024},{"line1": "23 ST GEORGES AVENUE","line2": "ST GEORGE","line3": "BRISTOL","line4": "BS5 8DD","town": "BRISTOL","postcode": "BS5 8DD","UPRN": 256024},{"line1": "23 ST GEORGES AVENUE","line2": "ST GEORGE","line3": "BRISTOL","line4": "BS5 8DD","town": "BRISTOL","postcode": "BS5 8DD","UPRN": 256024},

2) Postcode is shown both the line4 element of the address as well as the postcode element.

3) Addresses are not ordered as a human would expect to interact with the results. For example, when you give the postcode BS5 8DD you get results ordered as follows:

{ "data": { "address": [ { "line1": "1 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "10 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "11 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "15 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "16 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }, { "line1": "20 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "21 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }, { "line1": "22 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }, { "line1": "23 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }, { "line1": "5 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "6 ST GEORGES AVENUE" },

{ "line1": "7 ST GEORGES AVENUE" }, { "line1": "8 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }, { "line1": "9 ST GEORGES AVENUE", }

], "page_count": 1, "total_count": 36 }, "statusCode": 200 }

This means the address results are ordered like this for citizens searching for their address:

1 ST GEORGES AVENUE

10 ST GEORGES AVENUE

11 ST GEORGES AVENUE

15 ST GEORGES AVENUE

20 ST GEORGES AVENUE

21 ST GEORGES AVENUE

22 ST GEORGES AVENUE

23 ST GEORGES AVENUE

5 ST GEORGES AVENUE

6 ST GEORGES AVENUE

7 ST GEORGES AVENUE

8 ST GEORGES AVENUE

9 ST GEORGES AVENUE

Given that many applications would all need to code workarounds to the above foibles it is much more logical for the API to sort the above list as follows:

1 ST GEORGES AVENUE

5 ST GEORGES AVENUE

6 ST GEORGES AVENUE

7 ST GEORGES AVENUE

8 ST GEORGES AVENUE

9 ST GEORGES AVENUE

10 ST GEORGES AVENUE

11 ST GEORGES AVENUE

15 ST GEORGES AVENUE

20 ST GEORGES AVENUE

21 ST GEORGES AVENUE

22 ST GEORGES AVENUE

23 ST GEORGES AVENUE

And to not have duplicates/triplicates.

Environmental service requests enable things such as:

• Fly Tipping

• Pest Control

• Food safety and hygiene

• Animal welfare and more

Any applications where you can integrate with no code are included here.

This optional feature enables a council to map content to a specific XML format and then:

• Save it to a server location securely from the cloud to your network

• Post it to an API URL securely from the cloud to your network

• Email it securely to your network

To provide some examples, Cambridge City Council have successfully integrated forms with the Northgate Council Tax system and High Peak Borough Council integrated environmental health

Using Edit Mode to adjust the text shown to customers

Where you are accessing large bodies of text - for example, Guidance Notes you will have access to a full rich text editor, which is shown below:

As one can see a user can then easily go in and change content to be whatever is required. With the tool bar there are a huge amount of formatting options.

• Making text bold, italic, underlined, shadowed

• Add bullet lists/numbered lists

• Left/centre/right justify text

• Add images/tables/horizontal lines

Plus it is also possible to add additional languages where multiple languages require to be supported. When an additional language is selected another editable box will then appear and the translation can be added. The following illustrates this where Welsh was added as another language:

Editing Page Names

Where you wish to edit a page name there is a single line to edit as it would not make sense to provide the rich text editor:

All of the forms within here have inbuilt content management. This enables you to add and edit:

• guidance notes

• question wording and help text associated with questions

• declaration / privacy statements

• explanatory text when a person saves or submits their online form

With this capability you can quickly and easily make updates to a form, without needing help from IT/the web team, as and when it is required:

Alternative language support

With the content management functionality, it is also possible to support alternative/additional languages e.g. Welsh.

Within the form management area it is possible to create users and assign different roles, which in turn provide different privileges.

Creating Users

To create a user simply click on the Create button at the foot of the 'Users' screen.

When creating a user there are the following options:

The purpose of the different roles is outlined below.

User Roles

To ensure appropriate access can be provided to users, there are 6 specific roles in System Management. These are:

• Form Content Editor Full Access - this will allow users with this role to be able to use the edit mode feature within the development environment of a form. I.e. they will be able to update guidance notes, help text, question wording, evidence paragraphs, declaration content etc.

• Form Developer Full Access - this will allow users with this role, where eDesigner is licensed, to be able to have access to the Design Mode button on forms and there fore build / edit their own forms.

• Management Full Access - this will allow users with this role to be able to access System Management and therefore have access to publish forms from one environment to another, add/edit user permissions, change settings, change file content, change resources and update the password policy.

• Portal Full Access - this role is no longer used.

• Restricted Form Access - this role is only appropriate if the council provides 'Aliases' or copies of a form to other departments or external organisations and you want to limit the access of this alias to specific users. I.e. you might want to make a restricted version of say the eClaim and provide a link to the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Normally they would just be given the link. But it is possible to lock this down further by making the alias restricted to a set of users. If this is done they will need to be given this role.

• Admin - this is a super user role where all of the above permissions are available. This should be provided sparingly to a limited set of users.

The following options enable you to change the security of the retrieval of in progress forms:

Features

• The no code platform built for local authorities with local authorities

• Easily add questions with drop-downs, checklists, controls and logic

Form management such as publishing content from one environment to another and changing settings, configuration and branding, is all done within the dedicated Form System Management application.

Depending on what is being edited you will have the ability to save the text change the scope to be at Page/Form/Global level using the drop down to the right of the text editor. Global - If the scope is saved as global then this text is shared across all forms. Global scope is only available where the editing is taking place on a page that is a shared across forms. The shared pages are as follows:

• Launch

• Who Are You

• Save for Later

• Declaration

• Submitted

The benefit of saving something globally is that you can ensure consistency across many forms. Say for example you have 100 forms and you want the help text on email address to be the same. Saving this change globally means all 100 forms are updated instantly. However, please be careful when using Global as you could affect other department's forms without their knowing if you make a change globally. So always save content to page unless you know you specifically want to save something across all forms. Form - If you only want to change the text for this particular form then change the scope to Form. The only real use case of this is the title of a form. I.e. if you want to change the name of a form, you will want to change it for every page and so you would select form. Page - If you only want to change the text for this field on this particular page then change the scope to Page. This is what you should use all of the time unless you specifically know you want to save something to more than the place you're doing the change.

IEG4’s forms enable citizens to save their form and access them later. When using this function, the user is provided with a reference number to use to return to their form.

The reference number is generated at random and, by default, is eight characters long comprised of consonants. However, it is possible to:

1. Add a prefix / suffix to this e.g. FORMS-DYNGMSKW

2. Make it as long as desired e.g. changing it to 12 characters DYNGMSKWYNFG

3. Make it numeric e.g. 3040340304

4. Change the characters to be whatever you want i.e. if you can change the default use of consonants instead use: abcdeABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890!@£$%^&*()_+|~

A resulting reference from this could therefore be: 4~£DSS39@. So, the flexibility is enormous. Additionally, we provide support for you to add additional security and DDOS prevention measures through the following features.

Security Questions additional to the reference

When retrieving a saved form, by default, the user will only need the reference number they were given. This is the default behaviour because:

• • forms tend to be completed in one go and with only a few exceptions across the many hundreds of forms the value/sensitivity of the data is virtually zero to someone, and

  • we need the right balance of user experience, pragmatism and risk.

Nevertheless, because some services are longer/more likely to be saved and thus more likely to be more data rich, additional form retrieval security options are available. You can enable security questions to be asked which are additional to the form reference and these include:

• Name of their first school

• Their mother’s maiden name

• Their National Insurance Number

• A password of their choice

It is possible for you to set the minimum length of the password of their choice, as well as whether it should include special characters and a mix of upper and lowercase letters.

Captcha when trying to retrieve an online form

When enabled the following will be present on the online form in the 'Continue a form' section:

Adding a hyperlink via Edit Mode

In order to add a hyperlink you need to first go into the form in the Development environment and use the Edit Text function to open Edit Mode. Once you're in edit mode select the paragraph that you wish to edit. Within the editor click as shown below:

Once this has been clicked you will be presented with this prompt:

To ensure this opens in a new window change the Target to 'New Window'.

You can also add in a hyperlink that will automatically launch an email:

Adding a hyperlink manually

In order to do this you need to edit, copy and paste the following HTML and place it where it is required. <a href="https://www.ieg4.com/" target="_blank">The text that should be underlined goes here</a>

Replace https://www.ieg4.com with your URL. The bit that says target="_blank" ensures that this link will load in a new tab/window

The following is a list of all of the settings that are available, that would be set by you and what they do:

How to see/test changes made to a form

Internet browsers are optimised for speed and consequently have various processes to increase the speed at which pages are loaded. One of these is holding a cache of the state that a web page was previously loaded to be able to load it quicker the next time you go to the web site.

The backend code for the forms also caches form content for the same reason and usually when you make changes to the form and publish them, this is handled automatically. However, there are some changes which may require a manual clearing of a browser or server-side cache in order to see your latest changes.

It is possible to add a coversheet to the start of any online form by adding the following setting to it in System Management.

IncludeCoverSheetStart

I.e. Go to Settings then either:

a) Select the form you want to add it to specifically or

b) Don't select a form and add it therefore to the global settings

The latter option will mean EVERY form will have a cover sheet.

To add the setting simply scroll to the bottom and click 'Create'.

Then give the setting the name IncludeCoverSheetStart and set the value to true.

This will then enable this in the development environment for you to test it.

Make questions mandatory/optional and change validation messages

With Edit Mode it is possible to:

• Make optional fields mandatory

• Make mandatory fields optional*

• Update the text displayed to customers for mandatory question warnings

• Hide questions completely*

• Update the text shown for validation warnings

Questions that are allowed to be hidden

Where a question does not affect back-office integration it is possible to:

• Change its wording

• Make it optional/mandatory

• Show it/hide it from the form

• Change the help text in the same place

In the screenshot below one can see that the question is:

• currently optional because the mandatory checkbox is not checked

• shown on the online form because the 'Show on the online form' is checked

So to reverse these behaviours it is as simple as changing the checkboxes correspondingly.

Questions that are not allowed to be hidden

Where this is the case it will be made apparent to the user as shown below. I.e. the message 'Due to the National Schema requirements this question cannot be optional or hidden':

However, in this case, there is a validation error and as such, it is possible in this case to change the validation message that is in place.

The default validation is shown but the user is to add a custom version within the 'Fails validation error' checkbox.

The Resources area of Form System Management, contains all of the content in the form including:

• Questions

  • Whether they're optional / mandatory

  • Validation warning messages

It is possible to send in progress reminders to citizens that save forms but don't submit them within a customisable time range.

There are 5 settings for each environment that you can alter yourself in eGovHub System Management > Settings:

Changing the content of emails sent

This is advice on how you can set up / change the emails sent to customers when they save a form for later and when they have submitted a form. The specific example relates to the emails when submitting a Track and Trace Isolation Payment Claim, however is equally applicable to other forms.

• Within System Management click on the Resources tab.

• Then select the form Test and Trace SIP per below:

• Then locate these four resources. Just scroll down to find them:

The first two relate to the body and subject of the email that the customer sees when saving the form.

The second two relate to the body and subject of the email that the customer sees when submitting the form i.e. the receipt.

Save for later Email body example:

Simply change the words but don't change any of the <p> etc.

And insert the URL of your form/guidance etc.

<p> Hello, </p> <p> Thank you for choosing to complete our Test and Trace Self-Isolation Payment application form online. </p> <p> You have chosen to save your form to complete later. </p><p>Please use the reference number below to retrieve the information you have entered so far. </p> <p> [Reference] </p>

<p>Click this link to back to the form <a href="Your Form URL goes here" target="_blank">here</a> </p>

<p>Thank you,</p>

<strong>Your Council</strong>

<br>

<a href="Link to Coronavirus goes here" target="_blank">Coronavirus Guidance</a>

Send Applicant Email Body example:

<p> Hello, </p> <p> Thank you for choosing to complete our Test and Trace Self-Isolation Payment application form online. </p>

<p>We will be reviewing the content you have provided as quickly as possible. If we need anything more we will be in touch.</p>

<p>Thank you,</p>

<strong>YourCouncil</strong>

<a href="Link to Coronavirus goes here" target="_blank">Coronavirus Guidance</a>

eMail placeholders

You can include placeholders in your email which allow you to bring in dynamic data from the WhoAreYou page of the form.

Currently, the list of placeholders is as follows:

[Firstname] [Surname] [NationalInsuranceNumber] [AddressLine1] [AddressLine2] [Postcode] [DateOfBirth] [FormUrl] [FormTypeName] [Reference] (this is IEG4 Form reference) [ClaimReference] (this is the Back Office Claim ref for Housing Benefit claims and will only work on the HBAA form, as it will not be present in HBNewClaim)

It is possible to enable two-factor authentication to add further security.

This can be provided via the following:

• Microsoft Authenticator

• Google Authenticate

• Authy

It is possible to change the branding of the following to match your council's own corporate branding:

• The online form itself

• The document presented when reviewing answers at the end of a form before submission

• The resulting PDF from the form submission

As a result there is a dedicated 'Branding' section within the Form System Management application:

When you enter the Branding area you will see a list of all of the product services you have. This is because it is possible to have the same or different branding for each form.

Branding Folders

If we click 'Select' for one of these forms we see the following:

To enable organisation of different CSS files you might use there is the ability to create branding folders which is what the above is. It is possible to create a new folder by simply clicking the option of 'New folder' above.

Branding Files

If we click on the 'John' folder we see this which shows the available CSS files:

To create a new CSS file it is simply a case of clicking the 'New file' option:

When you've added your CSS file, you can go and edit its contents. Once you're happy with the CSS file, it is a case of ticking the 'Use this file as the active stylesheet' check box. Doing so controls adding this branding for the form itself:

Branding the Answers/PDF

As mentioned before it is possible to also change the branding for:

• The document presented when reviewing answers at the end of a form before submission

• The resulting PDF from the form submission

To do this you create CSS files as shown above but don't check the box 'Use this file as the active stylesheet.

Instead, what you need to do is update two settings with the name of the CSS file(s) you've created. I.e. go to the Settings tab of the Form System Management.

Branding the PDF

The setting:

BrandedHardCopyStylesheet_v2

Enables you to change the branding of the PDF output. The way you add the setting this is as follow:

Where the Branding folder is John and the CSS file for the PDF is Guide.css.

Branding the Review Your Answers

The setting:

BrandedImageStylesheet_v2

Enables you to change the branding of the Review Your Answers output. The way you add the setting this is as follow:

Where the Branding folder is John and the CSS file for the PDF is NewReview.css.

Moving Branding between environments

With the exception of branding of the PDF/Review Your Answers content, in order to publish content from one environment and indeed one form to another, you use the 'Copy to other sites' function.

This is against every product form/eDesigner because there can be different CSS folders for each product form and another for eDesigner.

To copy content from say the eClaim development environment to test and live you click the following:

Then click the other environments for that form to copy to and press Save at the foot of the page. This action will make whichever CSS is active in the Housing Benefit new claim folder, active in the Test and Live environments, as well as copying any CSS changes across:

Each form has the following functionality in terms of emails. An email is sent to the citizen whenever:

• They have provided an email address and

• They save their form for later or

• They submit their form

The Forms Portal provides council officers with the ability to:

Search for forms by:

• Form reference

• First name/surname

• Form type

• The Environment (Development/Test/Production)

• The status (In progress / Live)

• Date range

This is shown below:

For ‘In progress’ forms, the portal enables council staff to:

View:

• When a form was started / last accessed,

• The citizen’s name and address,

• Any ‘save for later’ emails sent,

• Any documents that have been uploaded,

As well as being able to:

• Open their form exactly where they left it off and

• Send an email to the citizen (where one was provided in the form)

• Lock the form so it cannot be completed by the user

For ‘Completed’ forms, the portal enables council staff to:

View:

• When a form was started / submitted,

• The citizen’s name and address,

• Any ‘save for later’ emails and the submission email sent,

• A PDF version of the completed form,

As well as being able to:

• Send an email to the citizen (where one was provided in the form)

• Re-process an integration

Publishing a Form's content

When you want to move content and settings from one environment to another e.g. Development to Test you will need to publish either the form in question or the framework. You should publish the form when you have:

• Changed the text of a page specific to the form - i.e. NOT shared pages - see below

• Changed any settings specific to the form

• Changed any resources specific to the form

To publish a form it is simply a case of opening the forms area of System Management and selecting the form you want to publish. Then click on the Publish link to the right of the Development Environment section for the form in question.

The user can then add details of what was changed to merit the need to publish.

Publishing the Framework

To publish the framework one follows the same steps as for a form but it is done in the Framework tab of System Management.

You should publish the framework when you have:

• Changed the text of a shared page.

The shared pages are:

• Launch

• Who Are You

• Save for Later

• Declaration

I.e. if you change some guidance notes on the Declaration page and want these to be published you need to publish the framework. You should also publish the framework when:

• You have changed a setting that is not specific to a form

• You have changed a resource that is not specific to a form

Settings and resources that are not specific to a form are those which appear on the Settings/Resources pages in System Management when a form has not been selected from the drop down.

For example, the setting 'InProgressReminderEnabled' is not specific to a form and so needs the framework to be published.

Sometimes, you no longer need a form, or wish to use a newer, better version of it.

To archive a form, access Form Details and click on the Archive this form link:

Once clicked the following 'are you sure' type message will appear:

When the form is archived, it disappears from the main Form List. However, if you click the 'View archived forms' check box, it will display these with a red suffix (archived):

Once archived, two options appear in the Form Details screen:

• Un-archive this form

• Delete this form

Obviously un-archive will restore the form back into use.

Building powerful, simple to use forms with eDesigner is simple and effective.

On this page we will outline the basics.

Creating a form

To create an online form, click Create at the bottom of the Forms page in Form Management and you'll see the following:

This UI is designed to enable you to not only name the form but to quickly set the length and specific pages needed.

The following illustrates these being completed and we will explain below what these mean:

Include a navigation bar - If this is checked a navigation / progress bar will appear on the left hand side of the form (on larger screens) and as a menu on mobile devices.

Include a guidance notes page - If this is checked a page to present guidance to citizens will be added

Include a who are you page - If this is checked a page to request details of name, address, NINO, date of birth etc. will be inserted into the form

What kind of 'who are you' page? - There are two types of these:

a) A standard IEG4 version, with a fixed set of questions that cannot have custom questions added

b) A blank version, which allows you to add whichever questions you desire

Include this many blank pages - this is the number of pages additional to the pages that have been selected in this stage.

Include an equal opportunities page - If this is checked a page to ask for ethnicity, disability, race, gender questions

Include a declaration page - If this is checked a declaration page that includes a 'review your answers' and a consistent (but editable) declaration page.

Once you have selected the options you want for your form you will be taken back to the list of forms on the form page. Find your form and click on the highlighted name of the form, which is a link e.g.

When this is clicked on initial creation, you will see a table illustrating the current version of the form in each environment:

Development will normally be the only one with anything in it on a brand new form. As the form is published to test and ultimately production (live) version numbers/increments will show.

To get access to the URLs click on the Name of the form again. There will only be one link and this will be for the development environment. As the form is published to test and ultimately production (live), two other URLs will be created.

The following shows the Form Details page and the URL for the development environment version of the form:

We will now walk through the various functions of eDesigner.

Once you have clicked on Add Item, you'll see the following UI.

Generic functions on everything you add

To save adding this guidance for every item type you should know that any items that you add will need the following to be added for them:

Field Id - This is a unique identifier for that item within the form.

Field Label - This is where you place the question or label to go with the answer you wish to get from the citizen. This is required for everything except upload controls.

The other things you can control are show below the label below:

So you can:

a) choose to make the question mandatory or not

If it is mandatory you then need to provide a message to present to the citizen where they have not answered it:

b) Include help text against the question:

c) Show the content on the PDF output

The default for this is to be true i.e. checked. This means that the content will appear on the PDF created as a result of the form.

This is useful where you don't want officers working on cases to see all data especially where it is sensitive.

But this sensitive data could be mapped to OpenProcess for a supervisor or a-n-other team to see per below:

d) Map to a key information field in OpenProcess

This is used where you want to pass content from the online form directly into an OpenProcess workflow. You need to map the Field id to the OpenProcess Field Code.

I.e. the above Field id matches the Field Code per below:

Specifically in the context of Form System Management, it is possible to set a password policy in the appropriately named 'Password Policy' area:

As one can see it is possible to set:

• A special character as required

• At least one number as required

• Both upper and lower case letters as being required

• Minimum length

• The number of failed logins before lock out

There is also an option, if you have changed the policy recently to force a change of password - 'Force password change for new user'.

'Show Change Password button on login' ensures that you can enable staff to change their password when they want.

Importantly, for minimum length and number of failed attempts before lock out you can set the values for these.

If you cannot see this option please raise a support ticket via help.ieg4.com.

First, and foremost whilst there are three distinct form environments, you can only design a form in Development Environment.

Once you've clicked on the link in Form Details your form will load. As it is the Development Environment, you will see a login prompt and you must have the appropriate permission to access the form:

When logged in you need to go to a Designable page to start adding content.

Once on a blank page click the 'Design tools' option on the top right. This will result in a slide out panel of functions appearing:

Click the 'Start Designer' option and the panel changes to show the eDesigner functions:

Click 'Add item' to start adding content.

Sometimes you want forms to not open up within OneVu.

The most obvious of these is forms that involve payments as they cannot be accessed within an iFrame. Some of the forms in the waste and licensing areas involve taking a payment.

Control of this is done by environment in the following screen's function:

When clicked the following will be presented:

The three options will open forms opened in OneVu:

a) In an iFrame embedded inside OneVu

b) Replacing the OneVu content and loading the form inside the window in place of OneVu

c) Opening in a new window leaving OneVu in the state it was before

This screen also enables you to change the name presented to customers inside OneVu.

It is possible to limit access to the Forms Portal by IP address.

Please request this to be enabled on your environment via help.ieg4.com who will provide the details necessary to do so.

The Portal Admin function provides the ability to create secure user access to the eGovHub Portal.

Users can be added with permissions pertinent to their user profile and it is possible to associate a user as being able to only access certain forms in the eGovHub Portal i.e. a Benefits Officer could be limited to only see Benefits-related forms.

Groups

This area is to used to add and maintain Groups, which are used to control the access permissions of users within the eGovHub Portal and the eGovHub Portal Admin.

Add a New Group

To add new group click on the “Add a new group” button and then complete all fields.

The Permissions are:

• Portal Full Access – this gives users within the group access to log into the eGovHub Portal. You then need to specify which forms they have access to using Service Areas

• Administrator – this gives users within this group access to the eGovHub Portal Admin to be able to create Users, Groups and Service Areas

• Reporting Change of Circs – this gives users within the group access to this specific report within Reportal

When you are adding a new group you can click to grant the applicable permissions and a tick will then appear alongside the permission:

Once you have selected the permissions click on the “Save” button and the new group will be added.

This will take you back to the list of groups (including the new one you have just added).

Users

This area is used to add and maintain eGovHub Portal users.

Adding Users

To add a new user click on “Add a new user” or “Add an existing user”.

“Add a new user” is to be used if the user has not been created in the IEG4 Single Sign On (SSO) environment previously.

“Add an existing user” is used to give an existing user to this IEG4 SSO environment.

An IEG4 Single Sign On (SSO) Account can, based upon permissions, provide single sign on access to:

• eGovHub Portal

• eGovHub Portal Admin

• OpenProcess

• OneVu Management

e.g. if the user you want to add to the eGovHub Portal is already a OneVu Customer Services user they will be an existing user rather than a new user.

Add a New Users

To add a new user click on the “Add a new user” button and then complete all fields. You will need to assign the user to at least one Group:

The user then needs to use the “forgot password” button to create a password to ensure they are able to access this service securely.

The user must respond to this validation email within 24 hours or the link deactivates for security reasons. If outside of the 24-hour period, the user can force a resend of this validation email by attempting to login using their email address and leaving the password field blank.

Add an Existing User

To add an existing user click on “Add an existing user” which will call the search to find an existing user using their email address:

From the email address entered the matching record will be displayed:

In order to give the existing user access click on the “change” button alongside Groups and then select the Groups that you wish to assign that user to.

Service Areas

Service Areas can be used to control which form users have access to in the eGovHub Portal. For example, you may want to restrict Benefits users to only having access to view information on Benefits-related forms in the Portal.

Add Service Area

To add new Service Area click on the “Add” button.

Type in the name of the Service Area and a Description, then click on the “Save” button:

The new Service Area will then be listed:

Once you have created a new Service Area you need to then link users and forms to the Service Area.

Click on the name of the new Service Area that you have just added:

You will then be able to add Users and Add Forms to the Service Area.

Service Area - Add User

To add a user to the Service Area, click on the “Add User” button:

Click on the drop-down arrow to search for the user and then use the checkboxes to:

• Allow the user portal access to all forms in the service area

• Allow the user reporting access to all form data in the service area

• Notify the user when integration fails for any form in the service area (please ignore this option)

Once you have selected the permissions click on the “Save” button.

To add more users to the Service Area repeat the Steps above.

Service Area - Add Form

To add a form to the Service Area, click on the “Add Form” button.

This will call the form search:

Click on the drop-down arrow to search for the form and click to select a form, then click on the “Save” button.

This will take you back to the previous screen where you can see the form that you’ve now added to the Service Area.

If you opt for email, it will ensure that the format of the answer is a validly formatted email address.

In order to add Google Analytics to your forms you simply need to go to the Resources tab of form Management and search (Ctrl + F) for 'Footer'.

When you've found it:

Click on it and copy/paste your script in:

Where you want to ensure someone provides a numerical (integer) based answer the smart field type to use is Numeric text field as shown below:

To capture postcode in the correct manner, you can choose to use the Postcode field as shown below:

Because collecting accurate dates is important in the context of local government transactions, which often have statutory / legislative consequences, we have powerful no code functionality.

When one clicks to add a Date field type the following is presented:

Layout options

There are three different version of date input available to you and these are controlled by the following options:

Display a single field instead of three separate fields

If this is checked (the default), the date will be a plain box and the user will enter the date in one string i.e. 01/12/2021.

If this is unchecked, it will appear as follows:

The boxes themselves illustrate the expected date format.

Date Display Type

This setting controls whether a calendar picker is presented or not. There are two options:

Text Input - where the customer types the date (this is the default)

Calendar Picker - where a customer can either type the date OR pick from the calendar that pops up:

Date Validation

You have the ability to control what a user can enter in terms of dates. This has TWO options.

The first is Static date validation.

To provide an example of this let's say you have a date field you want to add where the customer can only choose a date in a given financial year.

In this case today's date is not really relevant, what is though is the date range the customer can enter a date within I.e. for the past financial year the date range would be 01/04/2018 and 31/03/2019. This is how you can do this using the new date validation functionality where the range is static:

The second is the smarter Dynamic date validation

This is the one that will be used A LOT by you. So let's say you want a date field to not allow any dates:

• earlier than 1 month ago from today AND

• not allow dates any further in the future or later than 14 days away from today

The following illustrates how the new dynamic date validation makes this possible:

The drop down in the above which contains the 'Today' value can be changed to be:

• Today

• Yesterday

• Tomorrow

Today is the default as it is most logical and likely to be used. The 'Operator' drop down can contain:

• Plus

• Minus

With the defaults set to minus/plus for earliest/latest respectively as it is most logical.

The time span drop down has options of:

• Days

• Months

• Years

Weekly isn't there as one can, for example, use 21 days for 3 weeks.

Finally, note that it is possible to add validation to the earliest valid date but not the latest valid date and vice versa. And in the same vein you can also say for example:

• Earliest date should be static and no earlier than 01/01/2019

• Latest date should be dynamic and no more in the future than 3 months

If you want to ask for someone’s National Insurance Number (NINO) you can select this type and the question will automatically have built-in validation that corresponds to the rules about the format of National Insurance Numbers:

Note that you can choose to display the NINO as a single entry box or by unchecking 'Display a single line field instead of 5 separate fields'.

When this is unchecked we can see, in the screen show below:

That:

1. the format of the input fields reflects the expected format of a NINO

This option enables you to create questions which have lists in the following formats:

• drop down,

• radio button, and

• check box

Smart fields enable users to add questions with answers that have built-in formats to remove the need for council staff to know how to ‘code’ this intelligent behaviour.

The list of Smart Fields supported are:

• Date fields

• Email Address

• National Insurance Number

• Numeric Text Fields

• UK Postcodes

• UK Telephone Numbers

• Sortcode

Each of these will ensure that the format of the answer corresponds to the expected format for it.

There are three types of input field, beyond the smart fields of course, which are:

Text Field

The first option 'Text field' enables a simple answer to be provided in a single regular 1 line height box.

Multi-line text field

The second 'Multi-line text field' provides a larger text area where the answer could be large.

The third one is the most powerful

Test field with validation

This input field type enables you to create your own custom smart fields leveraging both the ability to:

• set a minimum/maximum length as well as to set a

• 'Regular Expression' on a question's answer

For example:

In the above we can see that a minimum and maximum length have been set for the answer.

Plus, we can see a regular expression is present. The purpose, of this seemingly gobbledegook, is to ensure the format of the answer they provide is EXACTLY the format expected.

There is also a dedicated Failed Validation error message, which enables you to provide guidance if the person enters it in a manner that does not conform to the expected format.

The Sort code Smart Field, like National Insurance Number has the ability to request the data as either a single field or with three inputs that reflect the format of a sort code:

The default is for a single input field to be shown. However, if the 'Display a single field instead of 3 separate fields' is unchecked it will show it as follows, which is a much smarter and user friendly way of illustrating its format:

This option enables you to add in blocks of text wherever you want within a form. With a rich text editor to enable content to be added in how you like:

This can also be used to add in ‘alerts’ and ‘warnings’ etc. which can then be shown based upon conditions.

With a built in ‘Source’ option you can also add your own HTML and thus style any content added however you wish.

To ensure that people enter valid UK phone numbers use the smart Phone number field as shown below:

Shared Lists provide you with the ability to save a list for reuse over and over again.

You have the option when creating a list to 'Save to Your Items'.

It is as simple as clicking the middle button below:

When this is clicked you need to give it a name for the reusable version of the list:

This will then be selectable when, instead of creating a new list, you choose to add a list from your items as follows:

This is shown below:

Once you've added items to ' they can then be viewed/deleted in there.

Adding an upload control that is capable of capturing supporting evidence from the customer is as simple as providing it an id.

The evidence when uploaded can be:

• Sent to OpenProcess

• Sent to your EDMS

• Sent to an

This provides you with the ability to save an entire section of questions/content for reuse over and over again. You can effectively create an entire page's worth of content into a section and thus be able to store custom pages in the form of these sections.

The following 'Save to Your Items' is now an option when you have selected to add the 'Grouped set of questions' option in the add a section function:

When creating lists/sections of questions there is the ability to save these to ‘Your Items’.

Your Items is effectively a place to see all shared/reusable content. It is also where one can delete lists/sections, which are no longer required.

Here we see lists that have been saved for future reuse:

As well as a section of questions, which has been saved for future use:

How you save/add these in forms is covered in the next two articles.

Sometimes you need to add another page to your form after you've created it.

To do this simply click the 'Add a new page' button:

You need to give the page a name (this will be used in the URL), a title (which can be edited later if necessary) and indicate where in the form it needs to go:

Sections enable logical grouping of content together.

As one can see there are four types:

Repeating sections

The ability to automatically repeat a set of related questions based upon a number a customer provides. E.g. A group of questions related to a child would be repeated 3 times if the question: “How many children do you have?” is answered as 3.

Grouped Set of Questions Sections

A section to allow related questions to be grouped logically.

A grouped section of questions can be saved to ‘’ for subsequent use.

Address Section

The ability to place an address search into forms that is able to search the entirety of the UK.

The default option, now that it is free to councils is 'Ordnance Survey'.

Simply click to save and you've set up an address section, which is capable of integrating with the Ordnance Survey.

Read more here:

Grouped Set of Questions Sections (from Your Items)

This provides the ability to insert a set of questions that were saved previously.

This powerful function means if you save a section with 30 different questions, it can be instantly be recreated. This is useful for council specific pages e.g. with privacy policy / GDPR related checkboxes to ensure consistency and ease of repeatability.

Read more here:

Form rules are added just like page rules.

The only nuance is they control the visibility of whole pages. E.g. rather than clicking the hide option click 'hide page(s)'.

When you do any pages which can be hidden will show. I.e. in the scenario below we will hide the page 'What did we get wrong' if the service was rated 5/5:

It is possible to have multiple form rules and thus make a 30 page form only ever be 5 pages to dynamically reflect a person's circumstances/scenario selected.

Microsoft Bookings

Configuration required by the customer

This describes the process of getting the credentials required for eDesigner forms to read and write to a customers Microsoft Office 365 Calendars and Bookings APIs

The settings we require are:

• Booking Business eg

• Directory (tenant) ID eg 9688d675-**************

• (Application) client ID eg a4db50fe-*****************

• Client secret eg GTa************

The Booking Business is the email of your business in Microsoft Bookings

To create the rest of the settings log in to the Azure portal

Part 1 – Create an App Registration

For the next three settings you need to create an App registration

Registering your application establishes a trust relationship between your app and the Microsoft identity platform.

In the Azure Portal go to Azure Active Directory -> App registrations -> New registration

Enter a display Name for your application. Users of your application might see the display name when they use the app, for example during sign-in. You can change the display name at any time and multiple app registrations can share the same name. The app registration's automatically generated Application (client) ID, not its display name, uniquely identifies your app within the identity platform.

Specify who can use the application, sometimes called its sign-in audience. Select: Accounts in this organizational directory only

Don't enter anything for Redirect URI (optional). You'll configure a redirect URI later.

Select Register to complete the initial app registration.

Once created, go the the Overview of the App registration where you will find the (Application) Client ID and the Directory (tenant) ID

Add a Redirect URI

A redirect URI is the location where the Microsoft identity platform redirects a user's client and sends security tokens after authentication.

You just need

Add a client secret.

From Certificates & secrets, and a new Client secret. The secret Value is needed for the Client Secret setting

Configure the permissions

From the API permissions tab, add the following permissions

Configure the App roles

From the App roles tab create a role as below

Part 2 – Create a User

For the final two settings you need to create a user.

The Username setting is the ‘user principal name’ and the Password is the login password

For this user, under Applications, add the Graph explorer application

And for Licenses, add the assignments of Azure Active Directory and Microsoft 365

Adding conditional logic is simple with eDesigner. Simply click the Page Rules option as shown below:

This then provides you with the opportunity to see the rules already on the page and the means to add more:

If we click the 'Add new rule' option we're presented with the following:

The rule designer is simple and intuitive where a user can:

• Give the rule a name and description to clearly understand what it does

• Add a condition based upon:

  • An answer to a question

  • An option that can be selected from a drop down list

  • A fixed value

• Add multiple conditions that can can use IS / NOT / AND / OR logic

• Indicate the question, who’s answer should be used in each condition of the rule

• Support behaviour where none of the conditions are met I.e. the ‘ELSE’ option.

• Show content based upon the conditions of a rule being met

• Hide content based upon the conditions of a rule being met

• Add to hide entire pages based upon the conditions of a rule being met

A Simple Page Rule

The following illustrates a simple rule / showing a question based based upon one question’s answer:

In the above, the user has said that if the question:

"Do you have any underlying health conditions?" is Yes then show the question (in the right hand side panel):

"Please provide some detail of the issues these conditions cause."

Notice that it is possible to 'Select all' of the content or 'Un-select all'.

When these are selected and the OK button pressed a count of the number of items being shown/hidden is added. I.e. in the above it has 'Show 1'. If this is clicked it then shows the content to show in this condition.

A Complex Page Rule

Example where a user is setting the answers to multiple questions in conjunction with one another will meeting certain content is shown/hidden. Here we can see the ability to use AND conditions too:

Powerful Rules in practice

To illustrate how powerful rules can be, see the following:

South Cambridge District Council built a pre-planning advice service that takes account of tens of combinations of things to both ask the correct subsequent questions and calculate the price a person needs to pay. This one page has 16 rules set up on it:

And each rule has many facets to ensure that irrespective of the many different factors that affect the price to pay, they can support it:

eDesigner comes with the ability to quickly and easily add conditional logic to your forms. It is possible to have many rules on each page of a form.

Rules can control the visibility of content on pages and the visibility of entire pages in a form.

The form is done by Page Rules

The latter is done by Form Rules

IEG4’s Digital Platform OneVu, which has a self-service citizen account, seamlessly integrates to all eGovHub online forms. Where a council has OneVu and an eGovHub form, that form:

• Can be discovered by citizens within their OneVu account simply by the council setting it to visible:

• Can be searched for using key words that you can link (without technical help) to the form e.g. “dumped mattress” could be linked to a fly tipping form or “change in wages” to a benefit change in circumstances form.

Where a council has IEG4’s OpenProcess product it is possible to create a task/case for a back-office user to complete from any eGovHub form without any code.

With OpenProcess you can link a form to a process simply by selecting the appropriate process you want to link it to via a drop-down unlike legacy EDMS/Workflow systems which involve the use of saving things to disk/indexing CSV files etc.

This can be used to enable back-office staff to know to work on the task but also to enable citizens to track the progress of their form where OneVu is licensed.

Creating an action

To do this access the following System Management screen and click the 'Actions' link for the form in question:

Sometimes you want to present details of jobs you already know about to ensure that you can minimise the number of people reporting it. Especially if you can provide a target date for its completion etc.

In order to present outstanding jobs on a map, it first assumes you've already imported them using the batch import process, as documented in the 'Set up' section.

Once you have confirmed that the above set up has been done it is a case of accessing your map item, added as described here:

Then set the 'Reported Issues source' to Symology and you'll see at option at the bottom to import outstanding jobs:

The user interface and functionality is the same within here as in:

The nuance here is purely that the user has the ability to choose from the imported 'Outstanding Job Types available' rather than assets:

Again, one can add multiple of these where multiple types are imported. Once added these appear in the map, as an icon/pushpin per your preference. In this case we have a red pushpin:

Where the Council uses the IEG4 Customer ServiceVu product additional functionality is available to support Agent payments within the eDesigner forms.

When this functionality is enabled if a form is completed inside CSVu the form will recognise this and behave differently. Currently there are the following options supported:

1. Where the Payment Provider is CivicaPayLink the form will automatically link to CivicaPayLink for an Agent payment to be taken online prior to submission

2. Where the Payment Provider is DISABLED the Agent can process the payment directly in the payment portal prior to form submission and then enter the payment reference in a text box on the form and submit the form. The form will not link to the payment portal in this scenario.

Integration with Adelante WebSmart Connect Module (as documented in Issue 1.8 21-08-2014)

Functionality is the same as for Capita Pay360 with the following additional notes:

• Fund Code: the fund code used in the eDesigner form must be a valid Fund Code on Adelante otherwise there will be an error when connecting to Adelante from the form

• Item Reference: if left blank this will be populated with the Form Reference

Within this release we have enabled three new key fields to be passed as a part of an online form that contains a map.

Where there is another organisation responsible for a road/street, like Transport for London in the case of London Boroughs, there is now the ability to import a list of all streets with an indicator to set the organisation responsible.

The prerequisite is that you provide a file of addresses in CSV format and clearly indicate which column heading contains the responsible party. This value will be populated into the map's CustomField so it's obviously important this file is accurate/kept up to date.The three fields are as follows where {MapSectionId} is the field id of the map control in your form:

The following is an example of the field id and its location in eDesigner for your form:

In order to pass these three fields this function one needs to:

a) Have already provided us with an extract of all addresses and the responsible party/owning organisation

b) Check the 'Check nearest road to selected point' option as shown (second to bottom) below:

When this data has been set up and linked to an OpenProcess the following shows the three fields mapped - those directly below the map:

As these are key information fields these can:

a) Be used in conditional logic/rules

b) Be used as template fields in notifications e.g. Emails/SMS/WhatsApp/Messenger messages

c) Be used in document management templates (where the EDMS function is licensed)

In order to present assets on a map, it first assumes you've already imported them using the batch import process, as documented in the '' section.

Once you have confirmed that the above set up has been done it is a case of accessing your map item, added as described here:

Then set the 'Reported Issues source' to Symology and you'll see at option at the bottom:

'Pull Assets From Symology'

If you click this option, you will be presented with the following UI. To assist with explanation, we have added some assets already.

The list of assets available to add are dictated by what has been imported.

Central Government is becoming smarter. It has recognised that there are common functions provided in local government and it makes sense for these to be commoditised to enable reuse across departments and across local government. To that end they've built dedicated functions to:

• Take payments

• Issue notifications (email/SMS/letters)

• Confirm someone's identity.

These are the , , , services respectively. In its , IEG4 has already integrated to both PAY and NOTIFY and our intention is to leverage these wherever logical and of benefits across its products.

So in this release, we've built in the no code ability to build an online form that fully integrates to GOV.UK PAY. For some perspective, I was able to add a payment integration to a form and test it for the first time in less than 5 minutes.

Setting GOV.UK PAY up

The only technical element to this process is to add your council's API reference key as provided by GOV.UK PAY. You access these within your GOV.UK PAY account. You can create an account if your council has not already done so.

The settings within System Management you can update are as follows with the critical one being the GovPayBearerToken:

You can only have one Payment provider for your form's integration. So if you currently integrate using Capita/Civica payment gateways you can change it to GOV.UK PAY but this will mean all forms will thus have that payment mechanism too.

Functionality

It's incredibly easy to add GOV.UK Pay integration to an online service once the above set up is done. It can also leverage the existing functionality dynamically change the amount to pay/sum a number of items and show them in a payment summary.

To illustrate we will build a form that allows people to sign up to a council's garden waste service. This takes a payment of £120.00 for the year.

So to start we've created a form:

We then go to the designer menu and click 'Payment Settings':

The above is for the actual GOV.UK PAY Description. Then to associate a monetary value with an item or items we need to add a payment item to the form. This is done by first selecting the following when adding an item:

The following is presented and we add Garden Waste Services as a 'Purchasable item'. This is to relay the amount of money that should be passed into the payment summary:

We then add a question to allow the person to opt in to receiving the service:

And add conditional logic (using Page Rules) to only show/add the payment if they select 'Yes':

Once done, we now have a form that will capture their opt-in, conditionally show the amount to pay and integrate to GOV.UK PAY. This literally takes seconds to do and we can see the description we added showing in the GOV.UK PAY Payment Summary on the far right image:

Custom Metadata

eDesigner's GOV.UK Pay plugin enables one to leverage use of the 'Custom Metadata' functionality in GOV.UK Pay.

This is described as follows:

"You can add custom metadata to a new payment. For example, you can add a reference number from your finance or accounting system, so you can reconcile the payment later.

You add metadata when you make an API call to create a new payment.

Your users cannot see metadata while they’re making a payment."

And you can read more about it here:

Essentially, as a council, you can pass additional, council-specific content to GOV.UK Pay whenever a payment is made on a form by form basis.

To access this open Click on the Design Tools button when in the Development environment of a form and click on 'Payment Settings' from the menu system:

• Field names must be between 1 and 30 characters

• You can have a maximum 10 custom metadata fields

• String fields can be no more than 100 characters long

As well as the description that is passed to GOV.UK Pay, you will see there's now the ability to 'Add a new field' for Custom Metadata fields. The rules around these are provided at the top i.e.

When you click 'Add a new field' you're able to provide:

• the name,

• the value that should be populated,

• the type (from a list of options that the GOV.UK Pay API supports)

The following illustrates an example set of 5 custom metadata fields:

What the above would mean is that the following additional content is passed to GOV.UK Pay:

Loqate Address look up is a premium function that uses natural language and intelligent algorithms to provide rapid and intuitive address search functionality.

You can read more about this here:

Adding this address look up is no different from the Ordnance Survey option, it is simply a case of selecting the other option when adding an Address Section:

Creating a job in a back office application that removes rekeying on behalf of officers without any technical coding etc. is the holy grail for product development.

It's because enabling the complex to be made simple is remarkably hard to do. But with this plugin we have enabled non-technical users to map the content from eDesigner forms directly into Symology.

Within the map set up for Symology, click on 'Push Jobs To Symology' as shown below:

Mapping the Form content to the Symology API

When you do so you will be presented within the following UI:

The purpose of the above screen is to enable non-technical users to pass the content that the Symology API - SendRequestAdditionalGroupAuthenticated- requires to create a job in the back office application.

The following illustrates this screen populated to provide context when we walk through each of the different fields:

We will walk through each now:

User name

The 'User name' is the user name that should be used for the update audit in the back office

Service Code

This tells the back office the service area to which it relates. I.e. HIGH means Highways

User Entry Fields

Notice how the rest of the fields have a label (in blue e.g. Request Type) followed by two fields. This is because, RequestType is the thing that needs to be sent to Symology. But the form needs to know which page and question will provide it. It needs to know this because you could build a 100 different forms with different pages and questions and we need to cater for that.

So for each item in blue you have one drop down on the left to say the page it will come from and another to say which question/answer will provide it.

Request Type

This is the type of incident/issue being reported.

Location

A text based description of the location. Can be used to help with pinpointing the location. E.g. Outside number 20 on the high street.

Geo Location

The geo-location i.e. physical coordinates in Easting/Northing measurement.

Description

Any more specifics or details relating to the issue in question

Customer Firstname

The customer's first name (if provided)

Customer Surname

The customer's surname (if provided)

Customer Email

The customer's email address (if provided)

Once you've added all of these you're ready to set up the trigger to create a job.

Adding an Action

To add an 'action' to a form, i.e. trigger something when the form is submitted, one needs to go to form details in Form Management:

Once you've clicked on that click the Advanced Create link and you will see the following:

Once done, the only thing you need to do is give the action a name.

Whatever you name, it will also shown in the screen below once you've saved it:

Now you can test submitting the form and seeing the updates in Symology.

Integration outcomes

When a form is submitted it can be viewed within the . Importantly, you can click on the 'Integration' tab and see the outcome of it.

Plus, on the 'Documents' tab there is a document called: api-input.json as shown below, which holds the details that were passed to Symology.

A sample file is shown below where one can see the fields mapped in creating a job - user entry fields are present.

Symology Insight is an asset management application used by ~60 local authorities.

IEG4 has provided powerful no code integration to this application, which includes the pushing and pulling of data between an eDesigner form and the Symology Insight application.

The functionality largely extends the functionality of the existing maps plug in, but importantly also enables jobs to be pushed to the back office.

The high level functionality includes all of the following functions without any code:

• Enhancements to the map control with the ability to:

The team at IEG4 have always had the ability to link online forms to back office EDMS apps. But this required this to be done adhoc through the database.

We've added the capability in eDesigner that you can create integration to your back office EDMS without code yourselves. This means you can build a form for any purpose i.e. for housing, council tax, benefits, trees, licensing, anything, and be able to:

a) save the PDF from the form to a file location

b) rename the PDF based upon data in the form or the IEG4 form reference

c) save a CSV related to the form which contains data that enables automated indexing, placing into the appropriate queue etc.

This is all controlled within a single new action called:

SaveDocumentAndControlCsv

Creating an action

To add an action you need to click on the 'Actions' link found here in Form Details:

Within there click Advanced Create and select the option :

There is a lot of control provided by this action and this means there are a lot of settings/options. We will walk through the ones you'll use and how to use them.

High Level fields

The following are the first set of fields:

The fields above are described below:

Name

Description

The Description is what will be shown in the Forms Portal when you look in the Documents tab.

Folder

This is the network location that the file should be saved to.

Why is this relevant?

1) This service needs to have access to the file location you specify. Or you will see this when you look in the Portal:

Access to the path '\\server\Imports\Test' is denied.

2) In a section later you need to get the information needed to make the action communicate via this secure mechanism - see Integration Proxy Settings.

Document Type

This will always be FORMPDF

Extension

This will nearly always be:

.csv

But we do know some councils have tns.

This is to specify the file format of the control file. See 'What is a control file' later.

Setting the filename format

By default, the filename of PDFs output from our online forms are like this:

QDDDTCMZ - Form.pdf

I.e. Form Reference - Form.pdf

However, for some EDMS applications the file is imported based upon the file name.

Therefore the following settings enable you to change the file name format. I.e. it is possible to have 5 elements in the filename.

E.g

CouncilTaxAccountNumber-IEG4FormReference-CTAXREF.pdf

So if the account number provided was 987654321 and the form reference was FHDSASUD, the filename would be:

987654321-FHDSASUD-CTAXREF.pdf

The options available to use for the filename are:

What is an XPath?

An XPath is a technical term () but the simplest way to understand it, is that it allows you to specify the location of a specific answer to a question in a form you've built.

This is really powerful, as it means any field in a form can be used in the filename or the control file output to maximise the level of automation you have. So let's look at an example:

xpath,//page[@id='whoareyou']/NationalInsuranceNumber,UNKNOWN

Three elements of this have been added to the standard format. These relate to:

• The page the question is on

• The specific question's id on the page to get the data from

• What to add if this is empty not provided

So for the above example this question is here and we can see the page id is the page the question is on - as shown in the URL:

If you go into designer mode and click to 'Edit' the question you will get its 'Field id'. We can see below the Field id for the Council tax account number is NationalInsuranceNumber and why it is structured like the above.

So basically you just need to get the page name from the url and the field id and copy and paste them into place.

For info - if the file format was instead like this:

xpath,//page[@id='whoareyou']/NationalInsuranceNumber

If no value is provided to the answer instead of putting UNKNOWN in the filename/control file it will place the IEG4 form reference.

Powerful XPaths

The reason this is really powerful is that XPaths can be added to multiple columns. Let's say you've built a form and it asks for licence reference. And it also asks for licence type in a drop down list. You can add both of these in the filename/control file to ensure it is automatically indexed the way it is desired in the EDMS. This will work for both drop down and radio item lists - not checkbox lists where multiple items could be selected. The format for the xpath setting where it is a list is slightly different.

logicalxpath,//page[@id='start']/LicenceType/item[@selected='True']/@value,equal,1,UNKNOWN

So in this case we have the same three fields page, question (field id) and what to do if not provided - UNKNOWN.

So going back to our licensing analogy. Let's say I want my filename to be:

LicenceId-LicenceType.pdf

I would add something like this to column 1 and 2 of the filename settings:

Filename Column 1 xpath,//page[@id='start']/LicenceRefNo

Filename Column 2 logicalxpath,//page[@id='start']/LicenceType/item[@selected='True']/@value,equal,1,UNKNOWN

What's a control file?

A control file can be created along with every PDF to tell the EDMS what to do with it. E.g. you could have an online form PDF called FHDSASUD.pdf. I.e. the name of the file is an IEG4 form reference and this would mean nothing to your EDMS.

A separate control file could contain this within its csv file format:

FHDSASUD.pdf,987654321,CTAXMOVE

Where the first column is the form that should be imported, the second says the council tax account number and the third is the document code/type that the form should be indexed with.

There are specific settings for the content of the control file as shown below. Note there are actually up to 20 columns available. We've only shown 5 to reflect the maximum of what most sites do:

The example above will create a control file with the following content:

LicenceCaseNumber,TEST,Licensing,TAXINEW,Filename.pdf

So if the filename was 987654321.pdf and Licensing Case number was also 987654321, the control CSV would be as follows:

987654321,TEST,Licensing,TAXINEW,987654321.pdf

The options available are the same as for filename with exception that the filename option is also available:

Components to Concatenate

This should be set to 0.

Integration Proxy Settings

In order to save documents on your network securely they are passed through the integration proxy service.

First ensure Use Proxy is set to true.

This service will have been installed by your IT team and the config file for this service contains three pieces of information you'll need. The config file is called:

IEG4.eGovHub.IntegrationProxy.Hosts.Windows.exe.config

The three bits of information needed are:

<add key="ServiceNamespace" value="This value" />

<add key="IssuerName" value="This value" />

<add key="IssuerSecret" value="This value" />

Alternatively you can ask IEG4 support for these using:

These values go here:

Source ID Settings

As mentioned earlier, it is possible to pass whether the form was submitted from OneVu or not in the filename/CSV.

Example

In the following example the filename is set up to be mapped to the account number. In a form the user enters their account number as 70129302.

In the Forms Portal the action has this:

File saved to \\server\Imports\Test\70129302.pdf. ||||

File saved to \\server\Imports\Test\70129302.csv

The CSV content is these four columns separated by a comma:

I.e.

70129302.pdf,70129302,CTAXREF,21/02/2020,

This is because we set the four columns to be:

• filename

• xpath,//page[@id='whoareyou']/CTRef,UNKNOWN

• static,CTAXREF

• datesubmitted

No code integration to your EDMS e.g. - done!

Reporting an issue with an asset

As shown in the '' article, one simply needs to click the 'Select this' button to record the asset to then use when creating a job i.e. the following shows the button:

And the following shows how, when the 'Select This' button is pressed, a yellow circle is drawn around an to make it obviously selected:

IEG4 is a Microsoft Gold Partner and, reflective of the fact that some councils have already made Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) part of their ongoing strategy, with the latest build of our online forms framework we have built functionality to integrate our online forms with D365.

These is comprised of three key elements:

1) Online form pre-population

2) The ability to update a case status as a form is started, saved, and submitted

3) The ability to add a completed version of the form (PDF) and any evidence uploaded to the case

We will walk through what this functionality is and how it is enabled.

Online Form Pre-population (from Dynamics CRM)

IEG4 has a consistent methodology for external applications to populate data into our online forms already. This extends that capability to handle D365 specifics too.

The method is using a post as follows with a variety of different tokens that enable pre-population:

POST https://<url-to-form>/launch HTTP/1.1

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

autostart=prepop

&x-api-key= <key>

&prepop.whoareyou.Firstname= <D365 account first name>

&prepop.whoareyou.Surname= <D365 account surname>

&prepop.whoareyou.AddressFieldsAddressLine1= <D365 account address line 1>

&prepop.whoareyou.AddressFieldsAddressLine2= <D365 account address line 2>

&prepop.whoareyou.AddressFieldsAddressLine3= <D365 account address line 3>

&prepop.whoareyou.AddressFieldsAddressLine4= <D365 account address line 4>

&prepop.whoareyou.AddressFieldsPostcode= <D365 account address postcode>

&prepop.whoareyou.DaytimeTelephoneNumber= <D365 account telephone number>

&prepop.whoareyou.MobileTelephoneNumber= <D365 account mobile number>

&prepop.whoareyou.Email= <D365 account email address>

&consumerId= <D365 account id>

&consumerCaseId= <D365 account case id>

&consumerSource=d365

Case Status Updates

IEG4 has a consistent methodology for external applications to populate data into our online forms already. This extends that capability to handle D365 specifics too.

When an online form is started we update the case with the form’s reference and also the case’s status. I.e. when it is started the status is set to 'In-progress'.

Then change this status as necessary. The following events show the status set:

1. when moving from one page of a form to the next (In-progress)

2. when the user saves it (Saved)

3. when a user submits it (Submitted)

This uses the standard Microsoft D365 Web API (RESTful) /incidents as shown below:

POST https://<URL-TO-D365-API>/incidents

{

“incidentid”: <D365 case id>,

“<statusField>”: <status field code for in-progress>,

“<formReferenceField>”: <unique form reference>,

“<formModifiedOn>”: <date the form was last modified on>

}

Form PDF/Evidence Uploads

When the form is submitted we will automatically update the status as per above but we will also automatically append a PDF containing the contents of the completed form.

Plus, where supporting documentation/evidence has been uploaded this can also be automatically appended to the case's timeline.

The following illustrating a piece of evidence (an image) having been added.

This uses the standard Microsoft D365 Web API (RESTful) /annotations as shown below:

POST https://<URL-TO-D365-API>/annotations

{

"mimetype": <mime type will be the mime type of the file uploaded as detected by the browser. The mime type for the form pdf will be ‘application/pdf'>,

"subject": <subject from matrix - see Table 1 below>,

"filename": “<filename of form pdf>.pdf",

“documentbody": <base64 encoded version of the form PDF> ,

"isdocument": true,

"objectid_incident@odata.bind": "incidents(<D365 case id>)"

}

The case ID is included in the update which is what links the document appropriately.

Using the method of saving XML to disk it is possible to integrate data from your eDesigner form with the application Civica APP (hereafter known as Flare).

First read the article below:

Next use the principles in there to achieve this.

So integration with Flare involves saving a file, in a format it expects, to a location which Flare looks for and imports automatically.

Data Mapping Template

Add the data mapping template as set out in the article above and, importantly, use this XML template below, which is tried and tested.

Once this is added it should appear similar to this:

Then, as shown in the Saving XML output article you need to map the answers from the various questions in the form to the template:

Having done that, add the Save Data Document action and provide details of where the file should be saved.