Custom Input Forms in Encompass Web: What Carries Over, What Doesn't
Ask a room of Encompass admins what they’re most nervous about in the web transition and the answer is rarely the APIs. It’s the forms.
Years — sometimes a decade — of custom input forms built with the desktop Input Form Builder: the loan officer’s one-screen cockpit, the closer’s checklist form, the correspondent desk’s fee worksheet. These forms are the daily muscle memory of your operation. And they do not carry over to Encompass Web.
Here’s what that actually means, minus the panic.
The blunt version
Desktop custom input forms are a Smart Client artifact. They keep working in Encompass Desktop — ICE has announced no desktop retirement date — but they do not render in Encompass Web. Moving to the web means recreating each custom form in the Encompass Web Input Form Builder, where custom logic is written as JavaScript event handlers rather than desktop code-behind. It’s a rebuild, not a file conversion.
Two clocks are running here, and they’re different lengths. The web transition is what forces form recreation, on your own schedule. But SDK-backed code-behind — common in desktop forms that do anything beyond field placement — is on the December 31, 2026 SDK sunset clock regardless of when you adopt Encompass Web.
That word — recreating — is doing honest work. There is no magic importer that takes a desktop form and emits a pixel-perfect web twin. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling the discovery phase of a rebuild.
What survives the move
The good news is that the parts that took longest to get right are the parts that transfer as knowledge, even though they don’t transfer as files:
- Field selection and layout intent. Which fields, in what grouping, for which role — the design thinking survives; the pixels don’t.
- Custom fields themselves. Your CUST fields and their definitions live in the instance, not in the form. They’re available to web forms.
- Business logic — conceptually. Calculations, conditional visibility, and role-based behavior can all be expressed in web forms, often more cleanly. But code-behind written against the SDK has to be rewritten, and pure-desktop tricks need new implementations.
What has to change
- Anything that assumed the desktop. File-system access, local printer tricks, launching desktop apps, window-management hacks — these patterns are dead ends in a browser.
- SDK-backed form logic. This is the same December 31, 2026 story as the rest of the sunset: logic that calls the SDK needs a new home, usually as Developer Connect-backed services or native web form capabilities.
- Forms that were really dashboards. Desktop forms sometimes got abused into reporting surfaces. In the web era, that job usually belongs to an actual reporting tool or a purpose-built web app — not a form fighting its own technology.
The opportunity hiding in the chore
Here’s the reframe worth internalizing: you are going to touch every form anyway. That makes this the cheapest moment in your Encompass history to fix form debt, because the marginal cost of improving a form you’re already rebuilding is close to zero.
In practice, that means the rebuild inventory sorts into three buckets:
- Rebuild faithfully. The forms that work. Ops loves them, training exists, don’t be clever. Recreate screen-for-screen.
- Consolidate. The three overlapping variants of the same form, built for three departments in three eras, become one form with role-based sections.
- Redesign. The forms everyone privately hates — 200 fields, 40 in active use, in an order that reflects 2017’s org chart. Rebuild around how the team actually works today.
Interview the people who live in each form for fifteen minutes before rebuilding it. It’s the highest-ROI quarter hour in the whole migration.
Sequencing: forms and the SDK clock
Form recreation isn’t technically bound to the December 31, 2026 SDK deadline unless your forms carry SDK-backed logic (many do). But the projects are joined at the hip in practice: the same inventory exercise finds both, the same parallel-run discipline de-risks both, and the same year-end capacity crunch threatens both. Lenders who treat “forms” and “SDK” as one modernization program get one coherent cutover; lenders who split them get two discovery phases and two invoices.
We build custom input forms for Encompass Web — faithful rebuilds, consolidations, and redesigns — as part of full SDK-sunset migrations or standalone. The form inventory comes free with the SDK assessment.