New app-building tools
We just released an upgrade to add some nice new tools for building apps in Fulcrum. When creating digital surveys for field inspections or checklists, the data types you use to create your data collection apps are key to data integrity, as well as speed and efficiency while working in the field. This new update adds two new field types to the App Designer: a time selector field and a checklist field, for quick “Yes/No” style questions. We’ve also added a much-requested ability to do range validation on numeric field types (e.g. “value should be between 1 and 10”).
Time fields are great for capturing a relative time value, such as an open or close time of a business. When entering values in time fields, Fulcrum will use 24-hour time, so values in your surveyed data results will show 9:00pm as “21:00”. Both the Android and iOS apps show a time selector wheel for these field types, making it easy for mobile users to enter the proper time for consistency.
Checklist field types (known as “Yes / No” fields in the App Designer) are a great way to present fast yes-or-no questions to someone on a mobile client, allowing for quick, single-tap entry of long surveys.
Within the improved App Designer, you can customize the label text that appears on the buttons, and optionally include an “Unknown” or “N/A” option for the survey question, depending on the desired input. Just like with choice field picklists, you can also specify a custom data name property that Fulcrum will store in the resulting data output, affording maximum flexibility in survey design.
As previously mentioned, we added the ability to include range validation rules for numeric field types, and also to control whether the number is decimal or integer. Now if you have a number field for users to enter within a fixed range, you can add rules to control the input. If you want to collect a pH value for a water quality test, for example, you can make the format type decimal, with a range between 0 and 14. These new features extend the flexibility to make Fulcrum more powerful for data entry and control over your input requirements.
Along with these additions, we’ve release updates to both the iOS and Android mobile apps to support the new field types, so be sure to update your devices to get the latest and greatest features. Stay tuned over the next couple of days for more on other useful features of the mobile apps.