Your digital data collection form offers a clear opportunity to invite collaborators to submit readings to your data source and streamline the data management process. 

With your digital data collection form, you can link your collected readings to parameters while also collecting information that will not be displayed directly on maps.

All information that you receive must be reviewed by a data source owner before it will be added to the master readings list. All of your data will remain accessible to you and your team via the data export feature too - so even if you don't plan to use Water Reporter's visualization features, you can still take advantage of the data collection form.

Forms currently work for fixed stations. If you want to collect on-the-fly observational data, you will need to use the basic Water Reporter mobile posting feature.

Forms should only be built after you have created your parameters and stations. Once you have created your stations and added your parameters, you can get started on your form.

As you can see, you must add instructions to the form as a first step. The form will be pre-populated with all of the parameters you created for this data source. Let's walk through what you can do with these parameters and then we'll tackle adding more fields.

Click on the two bars for any form field to change the order that the item appears on the form.

Turn a parameter or field 'off' for a reading field by toggling on or off the Enabled toggle.

Click on the pen icon to edit a form field.

Data Type
Please don't change this for a field that is in your parameter list! The parameter analytics only work for decimal data types. Any other fields can be changed to any other options. 

Instructions
Input instructions for each field are not required, but can be useful to give tips to your collaborators that are entering data into the form.

Required
Toggle off the required button to make entry into this field optional for the collaborator. Please note that owners will also be bound to these required and optional settings when manually adding or editing a sampling.

Toggle on the privacy option for fields that you want owners to be able to enter but not collaborators. 

Along with the form fields connected to parameters in the data source, you can add additional fields. These fields have a lot of flexibility for the data type. Click the green plus circle to get started. 

The add a new form field looks similar to the edit form field. The Data Type options are:

Make sure to click save before closing the new field.