Create Form HTML element inconsistencies and errors

When trying to migrate existing form etc to UiPath Forms one eventually comes around the HTML element in the Form Designer.

Unfortunately there are serveral issues with it that are not or very sparsely documented.

Example:

  1. Create a new “Create Form Task” Activity and open the Form Designer
  2. Advanced → HTML Element → Drop it into any of those columns of the preconfigured table
  3. Edit the HTML Element and put in some basic HTML Code

simpleForm.html (841 Bytes)

  1. Take a look at the preview, looks alright.
  2. Save and run. Go to your Action Center, you’ll see the form in the unassigned tab:

  1. Looks nice.

Now… Imagine you don’t want to use the weird table thing, why would you.

  1. So you move your HTML Element out of the table and delete the table.
  2. Check preview: Looks even better than before.
  3. Save and run:

ERROR: Invalid form layout Error code: 2403

Why? Does a HTML element a wrapper of some kind? How would one know this? There’s nothing in the documentation about this.
The HTML Element is such a huge feature to create good looking forms and yet there’s barely any info on how it works or what you can do with it.

I’ll continue experimenting with the HTML element and add new findings to this post but I’d love to hear your opinions and experiences with the Form Designer and especially the HTML element.

  • T0Bi

Update: Ever tried using JavaScript in the HTML Element?

Well it doesn’t work, which is ok. But is the error message We are sorry. UiPath platform is not available in your country. the right way to tell me this? Not sure.

Hi @T0Bi

Thank you for your input! I informed our team and the feedback is well received. Some improvements will be made to make the experience better (both in documentation and probably in product, about that weird error message).

1 Like

Hi @T0Bi,

The HTML Element in the Advanced Section of Form Designer can only be used for showing images or pdf files as mentioned in the documentation here.

At the moment we don’t support JavaScript in the Actions forms due to security policies, we are looking at safe-eval JavaScript in future.

To create a form you can refer to the documentation here.

Thank you,
Ayushya

1 Like

Hi @Ayushya_Jaiswal,

this is indeed helpful, I haven’t seen this yet.
Since you seem to know forms quite well, I’ve come across another problem:

I have 2 simple file path input fields. On their own, they work perfectly fine. Now I added radio buttons and I wanted to show only one path input, but as they do not have conditions, I put each of them in a container and added the show conditions there.

Now when I select one option from the radio buttons, one of the path inputsshows, same for the other one, so it works as intended.

The big problem is, that the values of those path inputs are empty when I try to access them via databindings.

This only happens when I put them into a container.

I tested it with a basic text field and the problem is the same. No data when the textfield is inside a container.

What’s going on there?

Edit:
I solved this issue by checking the json of the container and copying the condition logic into the file path input field. This way I didn’t have to use a container.

2 Likes

Hi @T0Bi,

Good to know that you have found a workaround for this, but if you want to access the data bindings within a container you would have to reference them from via the container field key.

For instance if your Container → Field Key → Property Name is container1, and your input file path key is file1, you may create variable container1 with type System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<System.String, System.String> and access the file input bindings as container1("file1").

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Ayushya

3 Likes

Oh interesting. On thing I was trying was to use container.file1 directly within the binding, so my idea was right :smiley:

Thanks for the quick answer!

3 Likes