Building a task form has always involved a second, invisible job: wherever the form needed a piece of data that already existed — a workflow step's output, a row from a connected table, a global variable — someone had to manually recreate a field for it and wire up the binding by hand. That's slow, and it's easy to mistype a path or pick the wrong component type for the data.
Field Explorer turns that into a drag: browse the data you already have, and drop it straight onto the form.
1. Where Field Explorer lives
It's a tab in the Form Builder's left sidebar, alongside the component palette. Opening it gives you a searchable panel of everything the form could plausibly pull data from, organized into three sources.
2. Three sources, one panel
- Tables — your connected MergeBase tables (Invoices, Contacts, or any custom table), so you can drop in a column without leaving the builder to go check what the table looks like.
- Nodes — the output of upstream workflow steps, including things like an OCR extraction step's detected fields or an API call's response. This is what turns "the workflow already extracted this" into "it's on the form" without a manual round-trip.
- Global Variables — workspace-level variables, including formula-computed ones, so a shared calculation stays a single drag instead of being rebuilt per form.
3. Drag it on, and it's already wired
Drag a field from any of the three sources onto the canvas, and Field Explorer does two things at once: it creates a form component of the right type for that data (a date field for a date column, a number field for a currency value, and so on), and it binds that component to the field's data path automatically. There's no separate step to open a binding picker and find the same field again — the drag is the binding.
4. Seeing what's already used
Fields that are already placed somewhere on the form show a small usage badge in the Field Explorer panel. Click the badge and the builder jumps to that component on the canvas — useful for checking whether a field you're about to drag in is already there under a different label, or for auditing a large form's data coverage at a glance.
Best practices
- Check Field Explorer before manually adding a component for data that comes from a table, a workflow step, or a variable — it's faster and it can't typo the binding path.
- Use the usage badges to spot duplicates before you drag the same field in twice under two different names.
- For OCR-extracted node output specifically, pair Field Explorer with the File Renderer's Field Extraction mode — drag the extracted fields onto the form, then use the document highlights to verify them.