Build your first form — quickstart

All editions

Five minutes from an ordinary SharePoint list to a form with its own layout and a rule that fills a field in by itself. No code at any point — and nothing you have to undo afterwards, because the list itself is never modified.

Before you start

Modern DFFS added to the site — see Install & deploy if you have not done that yet.
A list you can edit. Any list works; something request-shaped is easiest to follow along with.
Permission to edit that list’s settings.

Nothing here is destructive. A DFFS configuration sits beside your list rather than inside it — no columns are added, renamed or removed, and turning DFFS off returns the list to its stock SharePoint forms exactly as they were.

Open the form builder

Go to the list and choose DFFS setup in the command bar. The builder opens on an empty configuration, ready to lay out.

If the button is not there, the app has not been added to this site yet — that is step two of Install & deploy, not something to fix here.
Lay out the structure first, fields second

Every DFFS form is a grid holding rows, which hold columns, which hold everything else. It is worth getting that skeleton in place before you add a single field, because rearranging them afterwards means moving one element at a time.

For a form of any length, drop a tab set into a column and name the tabs after the stages of the work — here Request, Items and Approval. A long form split into three short tabs is the single cheapest improvement you can make to how a form feels to fill in.
Add your fields

There is no palette to drag from. Every container carries its own green + button, so you add where you want the thing to go — click it, choose Field, and the list’s columns appear with their internal names and types beside the display names, which is the detail that saves you when two columns read alike.

Once an element is on the canvas you can drag its handle to move it somewhere else, or nudge it with the arrows in its toolbar.

On a long form, watch for the “Hold here to scroll up / down” bands that appear at the top and bottom of the form area as soon as you start dragging. Hold the element over one and the form scrolls that way — faster the nearer you get to the edge — so you can carry an element to a distant part of the form in one go. They are a scroll affordance, not a drop target: whatever sits underneath a band stays droppable, and a band fades out when there is nothing left to scroll in that direction.

Fields render as their real control straight away, so what you see on the canvas is what people will get: a choice column arrives as its actual options, not a generic box.
Add one rule that does something visible

This is the step that turns a tidy layout into a form that works for people, so do it now rather than saving it for later. Open the Rules tab, add a rule, and give it a name you will recognize in six months.

Start with the smallest useful one: trigger it on Form loaded, then add a Set field value action targeting your requester or author field.

You do not have to type the value. Click into the Value box and an Add dynamic content link appears beneath it — it shows on focus, so it is easy to miss if you have never clicked in there. It opens a menu of everything DFFS can resolve at runtime: field values, the current item, the signed-in user, the site and web, timestamps, URL query-string values and variables. Pick Current user (info) → LoginName and [[currentuser:loginName]] is written into the box for you.

Worth the habit even once you know the syntax by heart. A mistyped token raises no error — it simply resolves to nothing, so the symptom is an empty field with nothing to explain it. The menu also spells column internal names correctly, which is where hand-written tokens usually go wrong. Every entry, and the token it writes →

One field the user no longer has to fill in, and one fewer thing for them to get wrong. It also proves the rules engine is wired up before you build anything that depends on it.
Save, then open a new item

Save the configuration and go back to the list as an ordinary user would — New in the command bar. Your tabs are there, your fields are where you put them, and the requester field is already filled in with your own name.

That is a working DFFS form. Everything else in the documentation is a variation on these four moves: structure, fields, rules, save.