Edit Existing Element Menu
The "Edit Existing Element" menu is a real-time list of all elements in your form. This list is organized based on the relationships between elements in your form, not on the order the elements will appear when the form is displayed.
Menu Changes When Grouping Form Elements
As an example, imagine the following group of elements have been created in a form
Now, you select 'Fieldset One' for editing
and group 'TextBox One' and 'TextBox Two' in it (see XXXXXXXXXXXX for details on grouping elements).
You'll see that the menu changes to reflect the addition of TextBox One and TextBox Two and clearly indicates by the shaded background color that they are members of the Fieldset One group.
When Fieldset One is not selected for editing, the menu shows the relationship between it and TextBox One and TextBox Two by indenting their labels in the list
Add another fieldset to group TextArea One and TextBox Three
and the menu indicates their relationship as well.
Menu Changes When Nesting Form Groups
formArchitect allows you to nest groups (group one group inside another) to an infinite level, although the usability of your form will surely suffer if you nest to too many levels.
Here's our menu with Fieldset Two grouped inside Fieldset One
Note the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom on the menu - this appears to allow you to scroll as necessary to see all the nested elements of your form.
Show Table
The Show Table link will cause the "Existing Form Elements" table to appear in the workspace.
Using This Menu
When using this menu, concentrate on defining semantic relationships between form elements and grouping them accordingly, not on how any element might potentially be displayed in your form. There are no visual representations of the form elements here for a reason - your form should be complete and make sense based on the relationships between it's elements before any presentation is applied.
If you can't visualize the form and understand the relationships between form elements simply by looking at this menu, go back and edit your element labels and/or groupings of elements so that you can.
When I mentioned earlier that the usability of your form would suffer if you nested to too many levels, the above test would make that very clear. Imagine sorting through a list of elements nested 8 or 9 levels deep and trying to determine the relationship between them.
(You could argue that defining css styles (presentation) for each of the nested levels would make the relationships between the elements clear and you would be right. But, presentation is meant as an aid to content, not as a replacement or crutch to prop your content up on. If presentation is needed simply to understand how your form is structured, perhaps the form content is poorly constructed in the first place.)