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FTForm Plus

FTForm Plus is the development environment for FormTrap and has been in place since the first customer installation at PharmaCare in late 2012, live first day of 2013.  This site is a FormTrap success story with zero bugs, unsuitable XML inputs (designed for Word), substantial consulting savings with an end point and hugely improved tight and concise quality output compared with what their JDE consultants were installing, with no end in sight. 

The design objective of this suite was to handle the existing standard output reports from QAD which require identification, removal of end-of-page and start-of page literals, removal of second and subsequent page headers (modern QAD reports have three different page headers for the first, subsequent and totals page).  

FTForm Plus handles IBM output files with carriage control values, XML files and conversions from PDF files.  We built this to handle anything and to remove what are separate functions in FTDesign of page rationalization and rules files for document recognition - absent in FTForm Plus as these functions are part of the form design.

This program handles ERP output  very much better than FTDesign (for example, allows a product with a lot of data to split across pages, provides leading and trailing pages and has RegEx logic and a full numeric parser built right in) and was built to allow prospects in Wealth Creation, Insurance and Banking segments to be more than adequately serviced where long phrases that cross page boundaries are the norm. 

Transition to FTForm Plus from FTDesign is available and eventually we expect existing customers find something they require that the new system will do and eventually move their forms to this development environment.  All new customers since 2013 are installed with just FTForm Plus support, however FormTrap Servers support BOTH development environments.

The design environment also designs QDE forms (see later).

Form design is a two-step process.  The first step outputs a standard FormTrap XML file from either the input text file or an input XML file.  This step recognizes documents from literals, includes all arithmetic calculations where required and allows RegEx logic to be applied to (for example) segregate shorter optional product descriptions from short comments where only difference is line length.   Step two is to format the output document, where full WYSIWYG control on screen is used to define and add logic to elements (for example, print the FOB literal only when FOB is not blank).

Training is via the Web in normally four sessions of around 50 minutes (with homework) where the user's most difficult form is designed to FormTrap's exacting standards, snippets saved (for example, the company heading details), lookup entries explored (we do at least one long product description) and that document passed by users for production.  Thereafter we expect an additional 4-6 on demand web sessions of under 5 minutes to explore and explain as users get into some of the more technical areas. 

Like all of our products, the manual is online, context sensitive from the FTForm Plus screen and frequently updated.