Forms and related lists

A form is a view of one record. It is made of sections that hold fields, formatters that inject widgets such as the activity stream, and related lists that show child records from other tables. Views let the same table look different for different audiences.

Form Designer is the drag and drop editor and is the right tool for most work, including creating sections and moving fields between them. Form Layout is the older two-column picker and is still faster when you need to move ten fields at once. Both write to the same underlying sys_ui_section and sys_ui_element records.

Related lists connect the current record to related records: affected CIs on a change, tasks under a request, approvals on anything. They load after the form, so a form with eight related lists feels slow even when the form itself is light.

• Prefer three or four related lists on a heavily used form
• Use the related list loading property to load on demand rather than with the form
• Relationship records (sys_relationship) let you define related lists that are not simple reference fields

Annotations put short instructions directly on the form, which is far more effective than a knowledge article nobody opens. Formatters add platform widgets such as the activity formatter, approval summarizer and process flow. Both are added from the Form Designer palette.