Length and/or Character validation within a Form

Charity Zakrzewicz

Please consider having the ability to apply character limits to data fields within the sheet itself, forms, and Dynamic View capabilities. This would assist with the quality of the data being provided. We have multiple examples that would apply.

Ten characters in a field (alpha or numeri or a combination alpha numeric).

The ability to apply hyphens or other characters within the data field character limitation/format style. Similar to the auto-numbering feature where you can have prefixes with hyphens/dashes, special characters.

SoS | Dan Palenchar

@Megan_ClavieParker & @Anais,

There's unfortunately not a perfect solution for this but you can implement these strategies:

• Use restricted dropdown lists when reasonable to do so,
• Use an Update Request to send the submitter a form to update their information when errors are made
• For phone numbers there is a built in validation option

VictoriaD

A word/character limit would be super helpful for data analysis.

I am supporting a team with a solution for their quarterly reporting. Every campus has a variety of programs and some programs overlap across multiple campuses. We love that forms has logic so that we don't need to make individualized forms for every campus/program combo. We also love that we can use this in combination with dynamic view so that campus outreach officers can review what has been submitted. We then love DataMesh to support our tracking of which teams have completed their work and which have not, which impacts their funding. All of these save us time.

However, we found that programs input far too much information in the forms regardless of noting in the description that there is a character/word limit. This makes it difficult to view and analyze qualitative data submitted. Due to the lack of this feature, this team is being pushed to look toward other survey platforms for this work.

Kim Stephens

We have several instances where we are collecting information that is being fed into another system. The other system has field character limits (10-30 characters). We are using help text to guide our submitter to the correct formatting, but wish that we could use a field validation or other tool to limit the number of characters allowed in the field.