The question is are you going to do it form-dependent or not?
Probably you would need some sort of Note screen, with additional controls to insert form’s fields. And a button to preview it in the browser window. The input would be a partial HTML (to ease on the user) with some custom tags for the form’s fields.
From one point of view it is nice to couple the template with the form, thus you can choose the field by its name. But on the other hand, it makes other operations more complex, like import/export.
Third, having the template linked with the form can help you implement something called “mail merge” in MS-Word – generating multiple mails identical except for form’s fields. You can use it to generate mails to the customers. But probably, it’s another feature, too advanced to be wanted by significant number of users.
BTW, adding the option to import/export the form using XML can solve the linkage problem. Just pile everything related to the form in one big file: form, email templates, picklists.
Decoupling the form and templates has its benefits. And in the template building you can insert fields by numbers as they are appeared on the form. And actually 80% of the times people would like to see them in that order. But what are you going to do if the form has different number of fields?
Your latest update to email export is very nice. But I was hoping for a freehand template system to customize the mail(something similar to MS-Word mail list system).
And the second thing: XML export/import. It could have a huge benefit. It can help you to develop desktop app. One thing is to put the entire db into the cloud. This is giant too.
But to be able to export a part of db(form) with all links intact and recreate it later(possibly with updates) is a very potent feature.
I plan on using iCloud to support sync services in Tap Forms. So they use their own import/export format for that. But a separate XML export is a possibility.
I don’t lock down on the XML. The only thing that bothers me is the loss of links. CSV is ok, if you could do the upgrade when importing and not the overwrite. So the import would update the changed fields. And the links that were not exported and thus could not be changed, would remain the same. It could be an option for the import: update / overwrite…
.
