Smartform Assistant

Nintex provides business automation strategies and recently acquired K2, a competitor in the same space. K2 has developed SmartForms as a solution for citizen developers to build low code web pages which guide the workflow process and provide a data entry platform.

Simple K2 SmartForms are very easy to build but complex SmartForms trigger cascading events and are exceptionally difficult to debug - a complex form may fire 150 events just to load a the first screen of data. Debugging is limited to an XML output filled with Guids which is almost impossible to decipher.

The SmartForm Assistant adds a custom tab in Dev Tools to aid debugging. This is exactly the same concept as the VueJS and Angular Dev Tool extensions.

The SmartForm Assistant reads two files in a running SmartForm, translates the one into a representation of all the objects on a SmartForm, the second is passed, to a service to convert it into a human readable form, of the rules used to run the form. The custom dev tools panel displays these inputs and the third tab displays an output of the events as they happen. The event listing is the primary benefit of the extension.