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Top Support Questions of 2019

December 27, 2019

As another year winds down, we thought we’d share some of the most common support questions we’ve received over the last 12 months.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Is there a way to limit a member’s ability to see certain records within an app?

There are two ways to limit the records a member can see in an app that they have access to: record assignment and projects. When record assignment is enabled on an app, records can be assigned to individual members. When this is done, the record can only be accessed and seen by the member the record is assigned to and any users that have the owner, manager system role, or a custom role with the ability to assign records. This is ideal when you either want to reduce noise for the data collector or you do not want the other data collectors to see the records assigned to other members.

Record assignment can be taken a step further by enabling record auto-assignment. When this is enabled, records are automatically assigned to the member that creates the record.

The other option is projects. It is best to think of projects as tags for records. When a project is created, members can be granted access to the project tag. When projects are enabled on an app and records are tagged with a project, only the members that have access to the project will be able to access and see these records. Owners and custom roles that have the manage-roles permission will always have access to all projects. It is important to note that, unlike record assignment, members with the manager role can only see records tagged with projects that they have access to. Projects are great for limiting the access of records to groups or teams within your plan. Additionally, record assignment and projects can be used together to limit what records individual members in projects can see.

‍Can I filter records on the mobile app?

For a long time, records could be filtered on the mobile apps by project, status, or by manually typing in the search box. Over the last year, or so both the iOS and Android mobile apps got an additional option allowing users to filter by the created-by and updated-by system fields. In early December, we released the ability to filter records based on the data contained within the user-defined fields. This was one of the more frequent requests we received for quite some time. Now users can filter in a way that is similar to the custom filters option found on the web app.

‍Can I annotate photos in Fulcrum?

Released at the beginning of the year, members on a Professional plan can now annotate photos directly in the photo fields in Fulcrum. First, to get this setup, the app designer needs to check the annotate option found in the photo field options popup window in the app designer for their app. After this has been enabled and after a photo had been added to a photo field the user can tap on the photo and then select the annotate option. Then they can annotate the photo as they wish.

‍Is it possible to have the status of a record change dynamically?

The status field is a great way to see the state or an overview of a record’s contents at a high level. As users come up or develop more complex use cases and workflows, there can be times when determining what the status field should be set to can be rather complex. On the other hand, users will sometimes just want the status to change automatically as the record is filled out and do not want to have to remember or rely on others to have to scroll back to the top of the record to update the status field. For either scenario, data events can help.

Data events can be used to perform programmatic actions when pre-defined events take place. So with this use case, when the record is saved (the event) the code within the data event will determine what the status of the record should be and then set the status accordingly (the action). Data events can be complicated to set up since it requires some knowledge of the data event schema, our helper functions, and typically some knowledge of JavaScript. However, our support team is here to assist so please feel free to reach out with the details about what you want to do and we can help. (Just click the red bubble at the bottom right of your screen.)

‍How do I add or remove users/members from my plan?

This is a question we were asked a lot more before the recent redesign of the Fulcrum web app that introduced the global navigation pane. Before the redesign, you had to click on the “red gear” icon and then click “settings” from the drop-down menu to get to the settings page, where you could click on the Members tab. Then one more click was needed to begin the add-member process. To remove members, there were some more clicks required to first access the permissions page of the member you were trying to remove, then the “remove member” button at the bottom of the page.

Now, assuming the role your user account has the ability to manage members, you just need to click on the Members tab within the navigation pane. Then on the Members page, you will either click add member or delete next to the member you wish to remove.

One tip that’s less obvious: Since user accounts in Fulcrum can be members of multiple plans, when a member is “deleted” from a plan, the user account associated with that email address still exists in Fulcrum. If you were to later use that email address when adding a member later on, the system will grant that existing user account access to your plan again. Expect some further enhancements to member management, specifically the add-member wizard in 2020!

We hope you’ve found this post helpful. If you have a question that wasn’t addressed here, head over to our help docs for the answers you need! Read our top support questions of 2018 here.

Fulcrum is a data collection platform that enables businesses to reduce costs, access critical data in real-time, and improve decision making at every level. With Fulcrum, you can create custom apps using our simple drag-and-drop builder to turn your paper documents into digital forms that your field teams can quickly complete on mobile devices.