Publishing Forms

Forms exist in one of three states - published, work in progress, and unpublished.

Publishing Forms

A form must be published before it can be used. This is true for public forms displayed by articles, private forms used in article extras and forms accessed using iCM Form Apps.

To publish a form you are working on, click "Save/publish this form" in the action panel.

This first saves the form design as a work in progress form, with the option to add a comment for version history, then takes you to the publish view. This second screen provides a read-only view of the form, displays any relevant warnings or additional information, and lets you "Publish this form" from the action menu.

If your form is already being used, your changes won't appear on your site until you complete the publishing steps above. If users are partway though filling out your form, or have used the Save Button to come back and complete the form later, they'll continue to use the old version of the form unless you manually clear the Form Sessions. 

Publish and Continue

The "Save/publish this form and continue" action is designed to be used while a form is in development. This action does not check to see if anyone has recently been using the form and keeps the Forms Designer open. You can still add version history notes, but is otherwise a quick way to make your changes live ready to be tested.

Publishing a Form for Production

When designing a form you can enable a debug panel and write additional tracing to the API Server console (see Debugging and Tracing in the knowledge base).

Right-clicking a form, or publishing all forms in a group, "For Production" disables the additional tracing options and turns the debug panel off.

Work In Progress Forms

If you are making changes to a form, saving as work in progress lets you periodically save your work and add comments to the version history. Unlike articles, you can use version history to roll your changes back to previous work in progress versions.

Saving as work in progress has no impact on the published form. The existing published version will remain on your site and can be safely completed by users.

Unpublishing Forms

To unpublish a form, right-click on it and select "Unpublish this form". This results in two things happening.

First, the form is switched to work in progress mode. You are free to edit items like the form name and access type, which are normally read-only.

Second, the form is removed from any item that is using it. If the form is related to an article, or being used by a Form App, it will be removed. Republishing a form does not restore this link, you will need to edit the relevant articles and add the form back to them. For this reason unpublishing forms should be done with caution.