Changing and upgrading forms with background images

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asceticwonder
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 8:44 am

Changing and upgrading forms with background images

Post by asceticwonder » Tue Nov 24, 2020 5:33 pm

Hello everyone!

I have been making all my forms and exporting them to images, then using the images in sheets and overlaying the input and output fields.

Then I made some changes to the form, including changing the image.

My front desk is now confronted with several forms that have no background image to go along with the data. Whoops. Going to see what went wrong, retrieve Sheets directory contents from my file versioning backup...

Can someone explain the expected behavior of forms: how and where they save to (DB, AtoZ??), what happens when you change the background image on forms that are completed with a different background image, is it possible to query an entire form so that I can easily provide the front desk with some raw metadata/data output for the several unlabeled forms?

How can I prevent this in the future? When I change the background image, instead of deleting it, just use an incremental file name and keep all old images in the Sheets directory?? I prefer to make my forms elsewhere for ease of editing and use them as background images.

Thanks!!!

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jordansparks
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Re: Changing and upgrading forms with background images

Post by jordansparks » Tue Nov 24, 2020 8:15 pm

The backgrounds are saved in OpenDentImages(aka AtoZ)/SheetImages folder:
https://www.opendental.com/manual/sheet ... image.html
Once you use a form with a patient, it's a copy of the original. Making changes should not affect any existing patient forms. It sounds like you might have accidentally saved your background in the wrong AtoZ folder. Maybe you have two of them and you got confused about which one was the real one? Once it's in use by patients, don't touch that background image. Make another one with a different name.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

asceticwonder
Posts: 19
Joined: Thu Oct 15, 2015 8:44 am

Re: Changing and upgrading forms with background images

Post by asceticwonder » Tue Nov 24, 2020 9:20 pm

Hi Jordan, thanks...

That turned out to be the problem. I had changed the background image and deleted the old one. Fortunately I have snapshots enabled on my NAS and was able to retrieve the original background image. I am in the process of fine tuning the forms with feedback with my staff, so I will have to figure out some sort of naming convention for the files in the SheetImages folder.

Still outstanding... In the sheets dialogs I see mention about fields being reportable. Can you provide a link or more info on how to run reports on certain form data? I dont see much about forms in the database documentation page.

Thanks...

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