Customize widget forms

To customize a new ticket and new comment forms in Helpdesk widget you will need to register an account on plumsail.com and use a Web-based forms designer.

This is another Plumsail product with separate pricing.

With Plumsail Forms, you can modify form markup and add custom fields to a form, so a requester will be able to fill those fields on ticket creation.

Note

Only text, datetime and choice fields are supported in current version. If you need to add more complex field types please drop a line on support@plumsail.com.

You can find detailed information on how to use Plumsail Forms in the documentation.

Creating custom widget form

Let’s look on a step by step example how to add a custom field to the ticket creation form.

Note

We recommend trying the tickets forms customization on a test HelpDesk instance. If all works fine, apply the changes to production. Anyway, if you accidentally broke a HelpDesk form, you can always restore it.

Firstly, register an account on plumsail.com.

Open Forms and select Public Forms - Design a form directly in your browser.

Forms account

Download default widget forms here: ticket form, comment form.

Import default ticket form from downloaded file, name it and save the form.

Default widget form

As an example, you can add Due Date field to the new ticket form. Drag Date control from the Fields section and drop it to the form

Custom widget form with date field

When adding custom field, make sure that control internal name matches internal name of corresponding field in SharePoint list. You can learn how to find an internal name of the field in this article. In our case, we need to set the internal name of our Date1 control to DueDate. You can change control Orientation property to Vertical to display the field title above the field.

Custom widget form with DueDate field

Save your changes. You prepared your custom form, the next step is to configure your widget to use it. Each Plumsail Form has unique Form Id. We will need to copy and paste it to widget configuration.

Press General button on Plumsail Forms ribbon and copy Form Id from Sharing settings.

Copy widget from Id

Navigate to your HelpDesk Widgets settings page.

Widget settings page

Open existing widget configuration or create a new one and expand Forms customizations section. It contains two fields: Ticket Form ID and Comment Form ID. By default they are filled with default forms IDs. You need to replace this values with your custom form IDs to make widget use your own forms. In our case we will replace Ticket Form ID with the value copied from Plumsail Forms settings.

Note

Widget form IDs are cached for 30 minutes for optimisation purposes. You will need to clear browser cache to apply your changes immediately.

Set widget config form id

Save your widget config and test your widget.

Custom widget form applied

Restore default forms

You can easily return to using default widget forms.

To do this you will need to navigate to your HelpDesk Widgets settings page, open widget configuration, expand Forms customizations section and replace custom form IDs with default values:

  • 633ea9ae-1f2a-47ed-a56c-7d4f2a363a02 for ticket form

  • 735c3778-5aee-48e7-a92b-0c63b1f250b8 for comment form