Managing Section Visibility

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Mar 27, 2015
2 min read

Form Section Visibility

By default form sections are not visible to other sections and are instead only visible to the editor of that section while it is being edited.  In most practical cases sections are visible to all other sections, except when the section is for routing purposes only or actually contains sensitive information (e.g., reviewers comments of a proposal).

To make a form section visible to all other sections, apply the “visiblefromall” class for the <form> element.  To make a form section only visible to certain sections, apply one “visiblefrom-XXXXXX” class to the <form> element for each section you wish to see that section, where “XXXXXX” is the section’s ID attribute.

Sections hidden in this way are stripped out of the HTML document at render time.

Sections Being Returned

When a user uses the “return” function on a given section, she may only return the form to a section currently visible.  In other words, if you hide a section from a user they cannot return it to that section.

Visibility of Other HTML Nodes

Other HTML nodes are assumed to be always visible when their parent section is rendered.  To restrict visibility of any arbitrary node apply the “visiblefrom-XXXXXX” class.  This can be useful if you want to give additional instructions to the person filling out a section that don’t need to be visible to all other parties.

This visibility can only be applied inside of <form> elements with the "form-section" class.  Also, a node can not be hidden from its own parent section.  E.g., in <form id="My_Section" class="form-section><img class="visiblefrom-Another_Section"> the <img> will be shown to Another_Section but also My_Section (since it can't be hidden from its own parent).

Visibility When Printing

When using the online forms stylesheets made available as part of the static asset collection you may apply the “noprint” class to any node that should be hidden when printing.  This hiding is done in the browser through CSS, not stripped out on the backend at render time.