Within Form Builder, you design data entry forms that include questions that must be edited or completed. If appropriate, you can also map the response fields of those questions to columns within your database. After a user responds to each question and submits the form, the responses and their mapping columns are stored in a holding table in the J1 database for later review. The submission is then processed (either manually or automatically, depending upon the form type), and the responses are stored in the appropriate columns as determined by the column mappings.

For the form types that need to be processed manually, the mapping columns help a submission reviewer identify changes between the submitted data and the data currently saved in the database for a given column, enabling the person reviewing the submission to decide which data to save to the database. For the automatically processed form types, the mapping columns are used to automatically insert or update the data in the appropriate tables. While technically it is the response field for a question that is mapped to the column, this process is referred to as mapping a question.

When you map a question to a form, you are essentially telling the system that it will update or insert a row into the appropriate table each time a completed form is submitted and processed. Therefore, once a question is mapped to a table, that mapping is considered part of a row (sometimes called a complex row). If you are mapping multiple questions to the same table, you have the option of letting the mappings be inserted/updated as part of a single row or you can specify that the system insert/update multiple rows in the table.