Submitting Forms

So far in the Getting Started with Forms section we have covered creating and naming forms, adding pages to forms, adding fields to pages, and using buttons to create basic navigation. But what happens when a form is submitted?

Data Protection

Your forms are will probably collect personal information about the people filling them in. When you design a form you need to think carefully about the information you are collecting, even if it's just a name and email address, and consider where it is being sent or saved, and who will have access to the data.

Form Actions

Form actions are a set of fields that control what happens when a form is submitted. They can send emails, start workflow processes, trigger JavaScript, save the submission to the History service or as form data, redirect the user to another URL, and perform a range of integrations, most commonly with payment providers.

You can read detailed documentation about every action in the Form Actions section. Some of the most common are discussed below.

Confirmation Message

This field displays a message after a form has been submitted. You can enter fixed text and access values entered into the form. See Confirmation Message Action for a working example.

Email

The Email Action field sends an email when a page on your form is submitted. It can also generate a PDF of the submission which is added as an attachment to the email.

By default the email includes all of the information entered into the form. You can customise the body text of the email using Handlebars Examples.

You can include more than one email action on a form. That's useful when combined with the ability to customise the body text - you could send a simple confirmation email to the user who filled out the form and a copy of the form to the relevant address at your organisation.

History

There are two fields that can save data to the platform's History service. History - Write Event can save a complete copy of the form, History - Form Reporting is designed to log the fact that the form has been submitted, but not store any user data.

The History service is an advanced area of the platform. You can read more about it in the Introduction and Key Concepts section. Before you start saving form submissions to history you need to think about how history is being used across all of your services, how you'd like to retrieve the saved data, and how you will manage data retention and deletion.

Save to Database

The Database Save Action saves the complete form submission to the database. iCM users with the correct security privileges can use the Form Data Browser to view and export saved data.