Customize Form Layout

Customize Form Layout

To change how a record form looks, go to Settings > Schema, pick the entity, and open the Forms tab. There you group fields into tabs and sections, drag them into the order your team works in, and — with a visibility rule — show a section only to the records it actually applies to. Changes take effect the next time someone opens a record.

The form layout determines how fields appear when a user opens a record. In HARi CRM, you can organize fields into tabs and sections, reorder them, and create a logical flow that matches your team’s workflow.

Understanding the Form Structure

HARi forms have three levels of organization:

1. Tabs — Top-level grouping (e.g. “Details”, “Financials”, “Activity”)
2. Sections — Groups within a tab (e.g. under “Details”: “Contact Info” and “Address”)
3. Fields — Individual data entry fields within a section

Editing the Form Layout

1. Go to Settings > Schema
2. Select the entity whose form you want to customize
3. Click the Forms tab
4. The form editor opens, showing the current layout (start with the default form, named default)

Managing Tabs

• Add a tab: Click Add Tab and enter a label (e.g. “Financials”)
• Rename a tab: Click the tab label to edit it
• Reorder tabs: Drag tabs left or right to change their order
• Remove a tab: Click the remove icon on the tab. Fields in the removed tab move back to the available-fields panel.

Managing Sections

• Add a section: Within a tab, add a section and enter a label
• Rename a section: Click the section header to edit
• Section columns: Switch a section between 1, 2, or 3 columns to fit more fields side by side
• Sidebar components: HARi forms also support sidebar widgets like KeyFacts, ActivityTimeline, RelatedRecordsList, HtmlTemplate, Counter, and Chart — drop them into the right-hand sidebar slot

Show a section only when a condition is met

A visibility rule hides a whole section until the record matches a condition you set — an “Enterprise SLA” section that appears only on Pro contracts, or a “Cancellation reason” section that appears only once a deal is marked lost. Open the Forms tab, click the eye icon on a section header (its tooltip reads Visibility rule), and build the rule as field + operator + value.

The panel is titled Visibility rule — show when. Pick the field the rule tests, choose one of the operators below, and type the value to compare against:

Operator	Shows the section when the field…
equals / does not equal	matches (or doesn’t match) the value
greater than / less than	is above or below the value
greater than or equal / less than or equal	is at or beyond the value
contains / does not contain	includes (or doesn’t include) the text
is empty / is not empty	has no value at all, or has any value

is empty and is not empty take no value — the value box disappears when you pick them.

Three things worth knowing before you rely on this:

• A rule you never finished is not a rule. If you open the panel, don’t pick a field, and save, the section stays visible to everyone. The panel says so while you work: No rule — always visible. A section only ever hides once its rule names a field.
• To make a section permanently visible again, open its rule and click Remove rule. Emptying the value box is not the same thing.
• Rules run against the record currently open, and re-evaluate as you edit. Change the field a rule tests, and the section appears or disappears immediately — no save, no reload.

Tabs support the same rule, set from the eye icon beside the tab label. A hidden tab disappears from the tab strip entirely rather than showing an empty page.

Used well, visibility rules are progressive disclosure — the practice, named by Jakob Nielsen in Nielsen Norman Group’s 2006 article on the pattern (drawn from usability research across 46 web-based applications), of showing people the fields relevant to their task and deferring the rest. As NN/g’s Huei-Hsin Wang puts it, staged forms “save users from spending attentional resources to scan and filter irrelevant questions.”

Use them for genuinely conditional information, not to enforce security: a hidden section is a decluttering device, and anyone who can edit the form can reveal it. To control who may read a field, use permission profiles instead.

What if a field on the form was deleted?

Deleting a field does not take it off the forms that used it, so a layout can end up naming fields that are no longer there. The record page no longer draws what it cannot fill: a section whose fields have all been deleted is not rendered at all, and a tab left with nothing in it disappears from the tab strip. Nobody reading a record sees a labelled heading sitting over empty space any more.

The layout still refers to those fields, though, and only you can decide what should become of them. So when you open that form here, a notice at the top of the editor names them — for example:

Some fields in this form no longer exist

These fields were deleted, so they do not appear on the record: Met by, Referred by. Remove them from the form, or restore the fields.

It uses the name you gave the field, never its internal column name. You have two remedies, and the notice points at both: take the field out of the layout, or restore the field if the deletion was a mistake.

The notice is advice, not a repair. It shows in the form editor only, it never stops you saving, and HARi does not rewrite your layout for you — a field stays in the layout until you remove it, which is what makes restoring a field put it straight back where you had it.

Arranging Fields

1. Drag fields from the available-fields panel into a section, or move them between sections
2. Place the most important fields first — the user should see key information without scrolling
3. Group related fields together (e.g. “Street”, “City”, “Postal Code” in an “Address” section)
4. Save the form layout when done

Best Practices

• First tab, first section: Put the most critical fields here. For a Contact, that is name, email, phone, and company.
• Progressive disclosure: Put optional or detailed fields on secondary tabs so they do not overwhelm the user.
• Logical grouping: “Contact Info” (email, phone), “Address” (street, city, country), “Social” (LinkedIn, Twitter) as separate sections.
• Consistent layouts: Use the same tab structure across similar entities for a predictable experience.
• Subgrids on a separate tab: If the entity has many related records, put subgrids on their own tab (e.g. “Related Records”).

Per-Profile Forms

You can create different form layouts for different permission profiles. For example:

• Sales Rep profile: Shows deal-related fields, hides financial details
• Finance profile: Shows all financial fields, hides sales-specific data
• Admin profile: Shows everything

This is configured by creating multiple form definitions and assigning each to a permission profile.

Next Steps

• Add a Custom Field to create new fields to arrange on the form
• Setup a Lookup Field to add relationship fields to the form
• Interface Guide for an overview of how forms appear to users