Designing a form

Studio → Pages → (a page) → Create form. The card opens on the form your dialog shows today, so you start from what people already see rather than from an empty canvas.

Layouts

A layout changes the arrangement, never the fields, the controls or the values. Turning one off gives back the plain form with nothing lost.

Layout	Good for
Sectioned	A long record split into labelled groups. The default.
Quick create	One title field and a row of small pills. Few fields, filled fast.
Wizard	A long form nobody can face at once. One section per step, with Back and Continue.
Choice cards	A record whose first question is “which kind?”
Segmented and files	A short choice, a long description and attachments.
Multi-entry	Adding several of something at once — addresses, invitations.
Upload and chips	A picture, some tags and a toggle.

The wizard checks each step’s own fields as you press Continue, rather than walking somebody to the end and only then saying the second step was wrong. If your database refuses something, the dialog jumps back to the step holding it.

Sections

A section is a heading and a number of columns (1, 2 or 3). Each field takes one of them, or spans two or three. In a wizard, a section is a step.

A section can also name one of its own fields as its aside: an image or a file field stood beside the rest, the way a product photo sits next to a product.

A field’s settings

Setting	What it changes
Shown as	The control. Only the ones the column’s type can actually answer are offered.
Label, Placeholder, Help text	The words. The column keeps its own name.
Width	How many of the section’s columns the field takes.
Required	Marks it required in this form. It cannot make a required column optional — your database has the last word.
Starting value	What a new record starts with: nothing, today, the current time, the signed-in user, or a fixed value. Editing a record never applies it.
Prefix / unit	The $ or the kg printed inside the box.

The column’s own rules are shown here read-only, with a link to Schema. They are the table’s business, not this page’s: a rule changed here would silently change every other page that shows the column.

Fields your table has no column for

Add field offers the table’s columns and its references — the links to other tables. A reference field writes the link rows, not a column. See References.

Missing columns

If your design leaves out a column that must be filled in and has no default, Studio says so by name. Such a form cannot create a row, and the notice is the only warning you get before somebody tries.

Reset to generated

Reset to generated does not store a copy of today’s form — it removes your design. That matters: a stored design is frozen, and a removed one keeps following your table, so a column added next month appears on its own.

For the same reason, a design that still says exactly what the generated form says is not saved at all. Looking around the designer costs nothing.

One Save

The designer reports its draft to the page editor and saves nothing itself. The page editor’s single Save changes writes the columns, the labels, the form and the filters together.