Design Names, Versions, and Descriptions for Groove Forms Tools
The Form Design Name, Version, and Description provide a mechanism for external applications to identify a Forms tool and to document the design for end-users and forms designers. The Form Design Name, Version, and Description are available for both the Groove Forms Tool and the InfoPath Forms Tool.
External applications implemented in Groove Web Services use the Design Name and Version to identify the intended use of the Forms tool as well as the schemas and business rules of that use.
End users can open the “About This Tool” dialog box to see the Design Name, Version, and Description.
We recommend that forms designers specify a Design Name, Version, and Description, but these fields are optional. There is no automated mechanism for incrementing the Design Version number; it is the responsibility of the forms designer to increment the Version number when appropriate.
We recommend the following guidelines for specifying the Design Name and incrementing the Design Version number.
Design Name
The Design Name is intended to be a unique string that identifies the organization that designed the Forms tool and the application class or purpose of the Forms tool. You should use the same URN format as the one that is used in Groove to identify other templates. The URN has the general format of “urn:your-company-namespace:unique-name”. If you are modifying a Forms tool template to create an entire new use for the Forms tool, you should give it a new URN.
Design Version
The Design Version provides a mechanism for form designers to document the modifications they make to a Forms tool template. Once a Forms tool template has been deployed and external applications have been developed to access the tool, it is very important to provide information in the Design Version number so that application developers can ensure that their applications are working with the correct version of the Forms tool. External applications can be impacted when fields, views, and forms are added to the Forms tool, or when an existing one is modified. Typically, external applications are not impacted by modifications that are purely user interface design, such as moving a field in a form.
The Design Version is an ordered set of 4 digits delimited by periods, and is stored as a string. The Design Version conforms to the version identification scheme: (0.0.0.0). The four version digits represent from left to right:
Major version
Minor version
Custom version
Build number
We recommend the following guidelines for incrementing these numbers:
Major version—change indicates an incompatible Forms tool schema change. For example, if you modified the Issue Tracker template and deleted the AssignedToIndividual field and added IssueManager, IssueTester, and IssueDocumenter fields, you should change the major version number. A major version upgrade of a Forms application should be considered a different application altogether. While functionally the application remains the same application class, that is it is still an Issue Tracker application, it is completely different from the perspective of its record data schema.
Minor version—change indicates that existing external applications should continue to work because no incompatible schema changes have been made. Note that in a minor version upgrade you can add new fields, forms, and views to a Forms tool but cannot delete or make schema modifications to existing ones.
Custom version—change is used typically to identify a “patch” release, which has specific functionality or modifications to serve a specific purpose.
Build number—change is a designer-specified increasing sequence that is used to associate a particular software build sequence to the forms application.
Design Description
The Design Description is the written description to be displayed in the “help/about” user interface. This is a rich text description, typically used for user help.
Locking the Design
You can prevent others from modifying your template by locking the design. To lock the design, check the "Lock the design when saving as template file" checkbox in the Feature Options of the Forms Setting and Options Basic tab. Then save the workspace or Forms tool as a template and distribute the template. When others use the template to create a Forms tool, they are prohibited from using the Forms Designer on the tool even if they are managers of the workspace.
You can continue to modify the design of your workspace; only workspaces created from templates with this setting are limited. If changes need to be made to your template, you can make them and distribute the modified template, which others can then use to replace their existing design.