Forms Personalization not working on a custom form

Quick and to the point today.  That’s what everyone wants anyway right!?

We ran into a fun problem with one of our AventX forms at a customer site and thought I’d share because we couldn’t find anything on it out there on the internet and maybe it will  help out the next person.

Essentially, we have a form that goes along with our AventX Attachment Xpress product and a customer wanted to use Forms Personalization to change the behavior of a checkbox on the form.  A perfect use for forms personalization right?!

Well, they made the forms personalization, but… it didn’t seem to take.  Everything looked right, but for whatever reason the personalization just didn’t seem to do anything.  We troubleshot the problem by throwing in custom messages, etc… but no luck.  We could not get the forms personalization to trigger.

We had used TEMPLATE.fmb as the basis for the form so we weren’t quite sure what was going on.  Finally, after some comparison of another one of our forms that DID work with forms personalization we found the problem.   It turns out that the WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE trigger did not have the standard call:

APP_STANDARD.EVENT(‘WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE’);

Somehow in the creation of the form we had accidentally deleted that critical line of code and rendered forms personalization DOA in our form.

Isn’t it always just 1 line of code that gets you?!

So if you are on this page because you can’t get forms personalization to work in your form…  Check your WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE trigger and make sure the line above is included.  If it is… well… leave a comment when you figure it out so you can help the next person out.