Efficient Technology Inc maintains a library of thousands of forms with constant updates and new additions. In addition, ETI is leading the way in terms of developing form automation standards for the entire industry, requiring ETI to be flexible and immediately responsive. Each new form that is delivered to be built offers new opportunities for the Quik! Field Definition to change and grow in order to meet new demands and requirements.
When taking the constantly changing environment of forms into consideration along with the breadth of the Quik! Field Definition (over 1.2 million fields as of Summer 2023), it has become relatively impossible to build every form to perfection or to take advantage of each new field added to the definition. In fact, adding a field to the definition takes careful planning in order to train the form builders, update Quik! software, update existing forms with the new fields and roll out the changes to the industry.
As a result of the complexity involved with forms automation, ETI employs the following principles when building forms:
- The "Standard" Service Level is intended to make it easy to pre-fill standard form fields (not premium form fields)
- The "Premium" Service Level is intended for the purpose of submitting data electronically from the form, but not for pre-filling purposes
- "User Defined Fields" are an option the Quik! team can create for customer-only forms when a customer needs a field defined that Quik! does not deem should be in the Quik! Field Definition (usually because the field is unique to that form).
- ETI uses best efforts to ensure forms adhere to the Quik! Form Standard and appropriate service level by putting each form through a rigorous process of pre-build, build, test, review and final review by the form owner (optional).
- ETI will fix form field errors and treat the fixes as high priority.
- The Quik! Field Definition allows for the ability to "bundle" or merge multiple Quik! Forms into a single document (form bundle), creating links between repetitive fields across the forms. ETI does not warrant that the bundling of forms will be perfect, and in rare cases, fields across multiple forms will result in conflicts and unexpected results.
- The main cause of this problem is due to the difference between text boxes and checkboxes on forms. If a textbox on one form has a field name that is the same as a checkbox on another form and the two forms are bundled, Adobe will automatically treat both fields the same, as either a textbox or checkbox. ETI is working on an improved definition to fix this problem.
- When a field on a form does not match a field defined in the Quik! Field Definition, the field is given a random field name with a prefix name that reflects the form's naming convention (e.g. NFSVC2349.FieldName1).