Youreka

My Requirements

OK, I am going to have to give up on testing this app right now. It's a bit too hard to work out what it's doing and how to set it up. I don't need half of the features it's got and I can't find the other half of the features I need. So here's what I need. 

• An external sites page is displayed - this lists all the current and upcoming events we have on. 
• The external user clicks a button to "Submit Event Details"
• A Form is displayed. 
  • This form is fully mobile responsive.
• They fill in some identifying details - maybe a The Event ID and their Email Address. 
  • Or I want to be able to send the person an email with a link with this identifying info already in the link and they click on the link and this info is prefilled onto the form. 
• They click next. 
  • Behind the scenes Salesforce finds the Event that is related to that Event ID and that person's email address, and ensures they were an Event Attendee (eg by looking them up in Campaign Member to ensure that they exist for that event). 
  • The form errors nicely with a custom error message if that email address and Event ID can't be found
  • The details of the Event are now displayed to the user on the form. These are read only fields. 
• There is a drop down field where the user can select which type of details it is that they want to create. 
  • The values in this Drop Down list relate to the Record Type on the Event Details object. Eg, the three options may be Event Feedback, Event Logistics Report, Event Incident Report. 
• Based on the selection from the Drop Down List a different form is displayed. By displaying that form, it has already created a record in Event Details and has already linked that to the Event, and filled in the Lookup to the Contact record based on the email address entered previously. 
• The user fills in the form with the required details for that form - eg an Event Logistics report would ask for No. of Attendees, and Event Incident Report would ask for the Name and Phone Number of the witness. But all these details are just stored in the one object - Event Details. 
• The user submits the form. 
• The form then says, thank you for submission of the Event Feedback, would you like to submit another form, and the drop down list of the other form are shown. 
• So they can then fill in an Event Incident Report after filling in an Event Feedback report - but it's for the same Event ID and Email Address that was entered in the first form. 

Now I KNOW I can build this in Form Assembly with no code, and a few forms. But I want this in Salsforce and linked from my external site and is styled to look and feel like and integral part of my external site, and I am not sending my users off to another URL that says tfaforms.com in the URL (yes, I know you can have vanity URLs in enterprise edition). 

Details

After doing my second round of testing on Fast Forms, Youreka contacted me to ask me to review their product. I don't normally do reviews based on contact like that, but I'm pretty desperate to find a solution for this specific project, and Youreka has one feature that is great - the ability to work in external sites. As I said on Fast Forms I want something like Payments2Us forms but customisable.

Unfortunately the pricing on the Youreka site is very obscure, and I still don't know if I am going to be able to put this to my clients because it is going to be expensive. But note there are cheaper versions, or versions in between Free and $60k/year as it says on the site, and 20% discounts for NFPs. 

Also it's just a weird name and that puts me off a bit. 

The app in some places calls themselves a forms tool and in other places calls themselves an assesment tool. I presume that's what the whole discoveries thing is. I really think they should break the app into two and have a much much cheaper version for just forms - I really don't think I will use the discoveries / assessment feature. 

Oh this video is just too weird - it's like magic. Don't watch that video as a sales tool to buying this product. There is so much business logic that has been built behind the scenes. This video sort of shows what's behind it, but then what's behind that? How did all those "discoveries" get in there in the first place. So much work to set this up with assessments. Oh, and if you are doing a whole new version, don't showcase your product with the old videos - build the need to do all new videos into the version release. 

Youreka vs Form Assembly

Youreka is basically only good for internal users to use the forms, or community users - you need to be authenticated. So I don't think my scenario is even possible with Youreka. Salesforce has some strict rules around what data external sites users can access and update, so that is the limiting factor on using Youreka for external sites. In Form Assembly everything is being done by the user that you authenticate to Salesforce with, so you have full ability to do what you want to any object - you just set it in the permissions for that user. 

Also see all my notes on Fast Forms as to why you may want a forms tool that is remote from Salesforce - so you can manipulate your data before putting it in Salesforce. I think you could with this too, but it would be a lot of work in Process Builder or Flow to do it. 

I think Youreka is a very specific app for doing this discovery stuff, that happens to have a forms engine. I don't think it's a forms tool. Once again, I would love to find a forms tool that is as good as Form Assembly but much better than Form Assembly. 

Setup

Oh good one. The first page I click on after installing, in Sandbox, gives an error. It seems this app needs Email to be enabled just to view the setup tab. Very very very weird. So I enable Email on the Sandbox, and now I can create the remote sites. I don't like this. It is very obscure. It just finishes and says your set to go - what did it do - only advanced admins will know where to look to see what it did. Don't obfuscate really really important security things. 

WHY OH WHY is it creating a remote site instance to SynapticAP Org on NA10? This is very weird and I don't like it at all. And why does it need a remote site to login.salesforce.org. Is it bypassing OAuth security in some way? This needs to be documented. The installation guide says nothing as to why these remote sites are created. 

Documentation

Community http://www.youreka.io/community/

PDF User Guides? Oh how 1999. Get a Wiki, please! You have a whole community site, but it's just a placeholder to download PDFs. 

My experience in doing the install was not the same as the install documentation - I'm hoping that it was because I was in a sandbox, not because I was in Classic and it was only showing Lighning? 

Oh dear, the documentation is just like the new Drawloop - (formerly Nintex Document Generation) documentation that just tells you what each label on the app does, but doesn't actually tell you how to use the app. I'm getting frustrated now. I can't even find Relationship Builder in the documentation. 

Getting Started

Oh dear, first thing I tried to do - add a linked section - it would not allow me to choose an object but it is required. 

Ah, after 5 minutes of hunting around, I see what the issue is. 

That is weird - you have to start with your app architecture, not with the form - say that FIRST in your User Guide. 

This video may help, if you can get past the Star Wars references http://www.youreka.io/project/how-to-create-field-links-and-dependent-logic-questions/ 

OK, that is even weirder - the popup message says there are no objects with lookups to the forms object. The Video says to go to the forms object and add a lookup there - nope, did that, it doesn't let me add a linked section. I created a lookup from Form to my objects, and that allows me to create Field Linked Questions, but why isn't it allowing me to create a linked section. I still can't find anything in the help about the overall architecture needed, or about linked sections (yet I'm still convinced I need a linked section). 

It is not intuitive how you get to Discovery Rules, or what discovery rules are even. Why can't I just click on the tab, rather than going Save and Continue and Back. 

Tips

• Customise the tabs on the Youreka app to add the main objects you are doing forms with. 
• Name all your lookup relationships, and related lists something other than Forms

Good Things

• The Lightning-ready forms designer. 
• OK, when you go to edit the form, the required fields must be entered - you don't have to explicitly add them to the form. I would prefer the control to explicitly add them to the form (and you can't do that, they are not available). 
• Oh that is nice, you can have multiple form submissions for the one record, and it will update the record. 
• It's all JSON in the back end, so that is good. We might be able to do something with that. 

Weird Things

• Why not have a save and close button - there is just about every other button on the screen. 
• The button layouts are weird. And I don't think it's Lightning that's the reason, but I don't think Lightning has a good paradigm for button placement yet.  
• Grr, do NOT call your app objects something as simple as Form - of course I already have a Form object in my org. 
• Why oh why can't I copy questions? It's quite a few clicks to add one Linked question to the form - and having to add 30 or 50 will get very tedious. 
• Oh wait, they have built a whole UI to add fields to the Forms Object? (Relationship Builder). No no no no no! Do not obfuscate that level of detail. Admins need to know what they are doing at all times. If they need a lookup on the Forms object, make them go into the forms object and create it. This is just weird. 
• And then you have to get out of the form and back into it again for that relationship you just created to appear in the form. 

Issues

• BEWARE - you are not going to be able to uninstall this app easily at all - it's got links into your objects. Test it thoroughly before installing it in prod. 

Free Version

• OK, how useful is the free version when you can only have two field linked questions - so that's First Name and Last Name - what about the rest of them. It is pointless having a free version if you can not do anything with it. 

Questions

• I can't find out how to add a lookup to another record in Salesforce. 
• Can I not have hidden fields? 
• What about prefill? 
• Are the forms responsive? 
• So discoveries look just like Labels - there looks to be no data behind them? Why not use Tags? Or Chatter? Why take up 2kb data for each Discovery that you are going to add to the record? Am I missing something? (again, discoveries are not something I would use - if I wanted stuff to happen after adding the record, I would add a field on the record, and run a workflow or PB off that field). 
• How does an external user add a new form, and fill in the the required links to the existing Salesforce data. 
• How do you do a child of a child form - my form did not enter all the required fields for that object. 
• How do you CREATE a record with a form? 
• How do you take payments with Youreka?