Setting a Nintex Form Template

[#1]

Applicable for Nintex Forms 2016, Nintex Forms 2013 and 2010. To set a Nintex Form you have created, as a template across your SharePoint farm, you will need access to Central Administration. 

Nintex Forms Designer

Open the Nintex Form designer in any list or library and create the form you wish to use as the template throughout the SharePoint farm. By default, the “Desktop” layout is the only one selected. If you wish your design to be unified for all device types, you will need to apply it to all of the existing device types.

It is easier to make a modified version for all the device types available in advance, otherwise every time a user wants to use a different device, they will need to resize or reformat the “Desktop” version of the template.

Add a new layout by clicking the device icon with a ‘plus’ symbol on it.  The next in line in the ribbon is the “SmartPhone” layout, so try adding that one first.  Your new design will be transposed to the new layout. However, due to the difference in dimensions, you may need to modify some of the design elements, including resizing images, to ensure the design has the desired look and feel.

Once you have created a layout for each device type, click on the Export button in the Ribbon.

Save the form somewhere on your computer and take note where the form is saved. This exported form will now be used in Central Administration to replace the default layouts.

Central Administration

Open SharePoint Central Administration and click on Nintex Forms Management and then Manage Device Layouts.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and locate the Templates section. Click on Browse.

Navigate to where you saved the form, and click Open. Now click Upload.

The form will now be uploaded and available when you open a new form within Nintex Forms.

Things to take note of:

1. When you replace the Template file with your own template, it will override the default form templates, including any of the device layouts associated with the templates. To revert back to the default form template, you will need to follow the steps above and upload the default template file. The Nintex Forms 2013 and Nintex Forms 2010 default form files are attached to this article
2. When a new template is uploaded, it will only be applicable to the devices you have created a template for in the export file. I.e. if you create a desktop version for a form, and import that file as the template, the only device available with that template will be desktop.
3. Workflow Task Forms - The styling of a new form template will be applied to Workflow task forms, however, the controls/layout of the form (e.g. flexi task/ request approval workflow task forms) won't be affected by any template changes.
4. When adding a new form template, it will only apply to any new forms designed. Any existing forms will not reflect the new template change. To use the imported template on a previously existing form, open the Nintex Forms designer, and click the reset button. Note: If you reset the template on a form, this will also reset all controls on the form, so you will need to re-design the form.

[eharris04]

This was very helpful.  Needed this to help show a customer why templates were a good way to go.  Thanks.

[jan]

I love that you include the default templates! Good article. I am a bit confused by #3. Any existing task forms won't change but any new ones created with Nintex forms will adhere to the same branding as defined in the template.

[eharris04]

Jan, I wondered about that as well. I'm assuming this is because the forms save the configurations and changes in xml and the time the form is submitted.  So when you update the template after forms have been created, it would have to open and update all the previous forms and then resave them.  Hmm.. wonder if there is a way to make some of the items stored in the template global so they can be changed, like content types.

[jan]

We recently did this for a client where we left the template as is, and created a custom CSS file that we uploaded to a document in the root of the site (together with a logo and JS files). In the Nintex Form itself we used the CSS link option to point to our CSS file. In the CSS file we just override all Nintex classes. This means if we make a change to the CSS class all Nintex forms will be updated automatically without republishing the forms. There are definitely pros and cons to this approach, but it worked for us in this scenario.

[#6]

Thanks for the pick up Jan Groenendijk - I've amended #3

Also added another note, see #4

[bschott]

Could someone help me to understand where the images are stored? My apologies if I missed that. Is there a default location where we should upload the images that would be used in the new default template?

[#8]

Hi Brian, you'll want to store the image for your form template in the site assets SharePoint library. When you reference the image in the image control of the form you can use the following path /SiteAssets/image.jpg

Cheers

[bschott]

Emily thank for taking the time to respond. That said I don't see how this is an answer. We would like to replace the default template with our own. We would like the new default template to have our branding. We would like the new default temple to be available to everyone in the enterprise just like the current OOTB Nintex default template is. The new banner image for the new default template needs to be available in the same way the existing Nintex banner image is available to everyone in the enterprise WITHOUT having to upload the image to a Site Collection.

[jan]

I believe this works with absolute URLs as well, so you can upload the logo to a library under the root site collection/site. Just make sure everyone has read access to this library. In your definition copy and paste the absolute URL to the logo.

The other option is to create a feature that will deploy the assets similar to how Nintex does it.

Although a bit outdated this blog post we wrote still applies: Branding Nintex Forms