Create a form

Collect is OrionGIS's field data collection tool. A form is the survey your team fills in. This page covers designing one.

#Your forms project

Forms live in a forms project. The first time you open Collect you are offered Create your Forms project; after that all your forms sit under it. The Forms page lists them with how many submissions each has received and when the latest arrived.

#Start a new form

Choose New Form. The dialog has two tabs:

• AI Generate — describe the survey and let AI draft it (below).
• Upload File — upload an XLSForm (.xlsx) or XForm (.xml) file you have made elsewhere, then choose Save as Draft or Upload & Publish.

#Draft a form with AI

1. In the AI Generate tab, describe the survey in plain language — for example "A household water-access survey: household size, distance to nearest water point, water source type (borehole / river / piped), and GPS location."
2. Choose Generate Draft. Orion AI drafts the questions, their types and the structure.
3. Review and refine the draft, then choose Save as Draft or Publish Form.

#Refine and edit

A new form opens as a draft. In the draft editor you can:

• add, remove and reorder questions and change their types;
• add hint or helper text to a question;
• choose Edit with Orion AI and describe the change you want ("add a question about water treatment") instead of editing by hand.

A draft is private and can be changed freely — nothing is collected yet.

#Add a location question

If you want to map the answers, include a GPS location question (or, if your form looks coordinates up from a list, latitude and longitude fields). See Form data as a map layer.

#Publish

When you are happy, publish the draft. It becomes the live form and gets a version number. On the form's page, Upload New Version replaces it with a new file, and Version History lists every version. Changes you make in the draft editor are saved with Save New Draft and go live with Publish Update.

#Form state

A published form is in one of three states, which you set from the form's page:

Next: Collect data in the field.