Form Arrangements

A Form Arrangement is a tabbed collection of child Forms and records that can be dynamically displayed on a parent Form/record to convey related information (ex: Journals or Tasks related to the parent record, or an additional Form for the same record that displays fields in a different way). A Form Arrangement can display:

• A Form from any configured Relationship: For example, the Incident Business Object is often in a Relationship with the Journal, Task, Configuration Item, and Problem Business Objects, so any of those Forms/records can be displayed in the Incident's Form Arrangement.
• Any Form created for the same Business Object: For example, Incident has several Forms that display Incident fields in different ways (ex: Resolution Details, Incident Details, etc.), so any of these Incident forms can be displayed on the main (default) Incident form.

  Tip: This is useful for displaying summary information, a subset of information, or information that is not always visible (ex: Details from an Embedded Form).

A typical Form Arrangement might include:

• Journals: Track what occurs during the lifecycle of a record (ex: Notes and history).
• Tasks: Track a piece of work that is created and assigned to another CSM User or Team.
• Approvals: Track approving/denying/abstaining content by one or more designated Users or Teams.
• Configuration Items: Track managed assets that make up the CMDB.
• Knowledge Articles: Track records that shares Knowledge (ex: FAQs, how-tos, workarounds/solutions, tutorials, processes, reference, etc.) among Users and Customers.
• Discussions: Track discussions with Customers and/or other Users.

The following figure shows an example Incident form with its Form Arrangement. The Incident Form Arrangement contains important data related to an Incident (ex: Journals, Tasks, Resolution Details, Problems, etc.).

Good to know:

• A Form Arrangement is highly configurable. You decide which tabs to include, the tab position, and the tab properties (ex: Name, image, visibility, toolbar options, supported views (Form, Grid, or both), default view, filtering options, etc.).
• Only a Major Object can have a Form Arrangement, and only one Form Arrangement exists for each Business Object in a Business Object View.
• A Major Object can be included in another Major Object's Form Arrangement; however, the data from a Major Object is read-only.
• Often, Summary Forms are used on a Form Arrangement because they are smaller and typically show the most important data.
• There are other ways to display "related" data. For example, a Relationship exists between Incident and Customer but displays using a Related Item Selector and/or a Mini-Summary Form that shows only the Customer’s phone number and e-mail address.

CSM provides an OOTB Arrangement for each OOTB Major Business Object. Use these OOTB Form Arrangements as-is, edit them, or create your own using the Form Arrangement Editor (accessed from within a Blueprint in CSM Administrator).