There are some very basic features missing from Machform, that would greatly enhance its usability, if added. I have asked for both of these before, but I think my requests bear repeating.
The first is what I call field nicknames. This would be an additional field property called nickname or short name. This alternate field name would be shown as the column heading for the form entries in the Entry Manager and in exported data. This property would be optional; if it was not provided, the entry column heading would use the field label, as it does now. Ideally, whether this nickname was used for the Entry Manager or exported data would be customizable on a field-by-field basis.
Why is this helpful? If you have a long field label, it can make identifying which column is which when looking at the entries for a form very awkward. If you could give each field a unique, short nickname, then this problem goes away. It also solves the problem of collecting multiple, similar sets of data. For example, in a form to collect a student's educational background, the form asks for all colleges attended. If the form allows for a maximum of ten college names, addresses, and so on, it either has to have ten sets of fields labeled "College Name" and "College Address", making it difficult to keep track of which name belongs with which address, or it has to have field labels such as "College Name 1", College Name 2", "College Address 1", and "College Address 2", and so on, which some of our form creators don't like the look of.
Using the Guidelines for User field property is a workaround for not having this feature, to some extent, but some of our form creators object to using it, claiming that students won't read information that is not on the screen permanently. Adding a single Guidelines for User field property also makes the whole form significantly narrower, which is which seems to be a poor implementation choice to me.
The second desirable feature is field groups. Two or more fields could be designated as a group, with a unique group label. Grouped fields could be moved together, duplicated or deleted together, and, most importantly, the group label could be used in logical rules to show or hide all the fields that are members of a group at the same time. I think the utility of this request is self evident.
It seems to me that my first request would be quite simple to implement and my second only moderately hard to do, and both would add very significantly to Machform's usefulness.