A form in Foldr is a way of asking people for something (a leave request, a supplier’s details, a document you need back) and having the answer arrive somewhere useful rather than in somebody’s inbox. You build it in the web app, publish it to a link or to named people, and each response is kept as a record and, if you choose, filed on a share as a document with its uploads beside it.
This article describes Foldr 11.1. You’ll need your administrator to have given you Create forms first; if there’s no Forms tab under Shared by me, that’s why. Setting up Forms is the administrator’s side.
Making a start
Go to Shared by me, open the Forms tab and choose New form. Give it a name and, if you like, a description, and the builder opens. Along the top are three tabs, Build, Preview and Settings, and the Save and Publish buttons.
If you’d rather not start from a blank page, Start from a blueprint offers a few ready-made forms (a contact form, vendor intake, lead capture and a document request) to adapt. Or ask Grace: with the Forms page open she can draft a form from a description (“a form for staff to request a new laptop, with manager approval”), or change the one you have open. Grace only ever creates a private draft and never publishes anything, and her changes land in the builder for you to look over and Save yourself.
Questions
Add a question lists everything a form can hold. Most are what you’d expect:
- Text and contact details: Short text, Paragraph, Email, Phone (with a country picker, and checked for a sensible number) and Web address.
- Numbers and dates: Number (decimals are fine), Rating, Slider, Date, Time, and Date and time.
- Choices: Choice, shown as a dropdown, radio buttons or checkboxes, and Consent for the “I agree” box.
- People: Person, which lets somebody pick colleagues or groups from your directory (more on that below).
- Things people give you: File upload and Signature.
- Things you show them: Document, Image, Video and Text / HTML, for instructions, a policy to read, or a video to watch before answering.
- Structure: Section, Panel, Columns, Table (for repeating rows, such as the lines on an expenses claim, with totals if you want them) and Page break.
- Behind the scenes: Hidden value, Lookup and Button. More on those in a moment.
A Person question is worth a closer look, because it reaches into your directory. You choose whether it offers people, groups or both, whether more than one can be picked, and which groups the choices come from. On a public form, the limit to particular groups is compulsory, so a form on the internet can’t be used to page through everyone in your organisation, and the picker only ever shows names, never usernames or email addresses.
A Lookup fills its options from an automation (a list of sites, cost codes or courses, say), and a Button can run one. Both only offer automations your administrator has approved for forms, so if the list is empty, that’s who to ask.
Making questions behave
Each question has a handful of rules you can set: Show this question when, Required when, Valid when, and either a Computed value (read-only) or a Default value (editable). Anything in double curly brackets, like {{name}}, is filled in from other answers, which works in labels too (“Thanks, {{name}}. Which site are you at?”).
The rules are checked again by Foldr when the form is submitted, not just in the browser, and answers to questions that were hidden at the time are thrown away rather than kept.
Pages and skip logic
A Page break starts a new page, with its own title and description. Each page can then have Skip logic: rules of the form “Go to … when this is true”, including Finish (submit the form). The first rule that matches wins, and if none do, the person carries on to the next page. Questions on a page somebody skipped aren’t required and aren’t kept.
The Preview tab lets you walk through the whole thing as a respondent would, with Reset answers to start again. Submit is switched off in preview, so you can’t file a test response by accident.
Who can fill it in?
On Settings, under Who can fill this form, you choose between two kinds of form.
Anyone with the link. A public form, for people you don’t know yet: enquiries, applications, event sign-ups. Nobody needs an account. You’ll only see this option if your administrator has given you Create public forms. The link is your Foldr’s address followed by /forms/ and an identifier, and under Form link you can set a Custom path that’s easier to read out.
There’s no CAPTCHA for people to squint at. Instead the form does a quick, invisible check in the browser before anything is sent, and limits how quickly answers can arrive, which deals with the automated nuisance without making real people identify traffic lights.
Only the people you add. A restricted form, which is the default. Under Add people, groups, or an email, name colleagues or groups (members of groups inside the group are included), and, if you’re allowed to invite external recipients, email addresses of people outside your organisation.
- Colleagues get an email when the form is published, or when they’re added afterwards, and the form waits for them under Shared with me, with a badge until they’ve responded. They sign in as normal to fill it in.
- People invited by email get a private link that signs them straight in. If you’d like them to set a password as well, switch on Require people invited by email to set a password.
Invitations only go out when the form is published, so you can take your time getting the list right.
Deadlines and reminders
For each person or group you’ve added, you can set Available from and Respond by, and choose what happens once the deadline passes: Reminder only, Block late responses (they can still see the form but not submit it, which is the default), or Close to them after (they can’t open it at all).
Send reminders chases people invited by email every day, two days, three days or week, up to three times, and stops by itself once they’ve responded or the form closes. The Recipients tab in the form’s Submissions view also has a Remind button for a nudge right now, and Revoke for taking somebody off the list and switching their link off.
When is the form open?
Under Schedule & limits:
- Opens and Closes put the form on a timetable.
- Limit total responses closes it automatically once it has had that many, which is the thing you want for a course with twelve places. Two people pressing Submit at the same moment can’t take it to thirteen.
- Let people edit their response after submitting lets respondents come back and change their answers.
Under Options, Let respondents save and finish later is worth switching on for anything long. The form gains a Save & finish later button that gives the person a private link to pick up where they left off. A saved response is kept for 30 days after it was last saved, and every visit that saves again starts the 30 days afresh, so somebody working through it over a few weeks won’t lose it. After 30 days with no visit it’s cleared away, along with anything they’d uploaded to it.
If they were signed in when they saved, only they can carry it on, even if somebody else gets hold of the link. On a public form, where there’s no sign-in, the link itself is the key and anyone who has it can carry on the response, so it’s worth them keeping it to themselves. The same card has Show the page progress bar and Form width.
After submitting decides what people see when they’re done: Show a thank-you message or Redirect to a web address.
Where do the answers go?
Every response is kept as a record in Foldr whatever else you choose, and you can always read and export it. On Settings, Where responses go decides what, if anything, is written to a share as well. Pick a destination folder, and then under Save each response as:
- Record only (no file), when you just want the answers in Foldr.
- One file per response, one document in the destination folder for each person.
- A folder per response, a folder holding the response document plus everything the person uploaded. This is the one to choose if the form has a File upload question, because the uploads land in the folder alongside the answers.
- Append to a spreadsheet (CSV), one row per response in a single file (
responses.csvunless you name it). If you add a question later, its column is added at the end, so earlier rows stay where they were.
File format can be PDF, Word, JSON, Text or Markdown. It starts on JSON, which suits a form whose responses are being picked up by an automation, but if people are going to read the files, you almost certainly want PDF or Word, and it’s easy to miss. PDF and Word use your question labels as they were when that person filled the form in.
File name is built from tokens: the form name, a response number, the submitter’s email, and the date and time in various shapes. On a public form there’s no signed-in person, so if you want their email in the file name, point Submitter email question at the question that asks for it; otherwise it says “anonymous”. (A folder’s date is when the person started, which is usually the same day but not always.)
A File upload question needs a destination folder to write to, and each upload can be up to 25 MB. Uploads are written into the response’s folder as they happen, before the person presses Submit, so you may occasionally see a folder for somebody who’s still filling the form in. If they give up, the folder and everything in it are cleared away after a day without activity (or after 30 days, if they’d saved it to finish later). If the destination share has search switched on, response files and uploads are indexed and findable like anything else on it.
Saving answers into custom fields
Set a question to Save to field and its answer is written onto the response file as a custom field value, which is what lets you search, sort and filter responses by department, reference number or person rather than by file name. The fields on offer are the ones your administrator has allowed forms to write to on that share.
What happens after Submit?
Under Add an action, a form can do something with each response once it’s filed. Each action can have Only run this when…, so it only fires for some responses, and each runs in the background: if one fails, the response is still safely kept.
Email notification. Tell the form’s owner, send the person who responded a copy of their answers, and email anybody else you name.
Send for signature. If you have Foldr Sign, a response can go straight out for signing, either on a signature template or as a PDF of the person’s own answers. Each role on the template can be signed by the person filling in the form, a fixed email address, or an address given in one of the answers, and answers can pre-fill fields on the document (locked, so the signer can’t change them). Where the only signer is the person who filled in the form, they go straight from Submit into signing; otherwise the signers are emailed. See Sending a document for signature.
Request approval. With Reviews and Approvals, each response can be held for sign-off by any reviewer for the share, specific people or groups, or the person named in one of the answers (a Person question saved to a field). An administrator sets this part up; if you see “An administrator can set up approval for this form”, that’s the reason.
Create a disclosure case. With Disclose, a form can be the front door for subject access and freedom of information requests. You choose the request type and which answers give the name of the person the request is about, the requester and so on, and each response arrives as an unclaimed case for a case manager to review, claim and mark as received. Setting up Disclose covers the rest.
Every response also raises a Form Completed event that MaSH automations can react to, carrying the answers and the file that was written. See Events and triggers.
Publishing, and changing your mind
Publish checks the form before it goes live and tells you if something’s wrong (two questions sharing a key, a rule that doesn’t make sense, a signature template that’s moved, a picture that can’t be loaded). Once it’s published, Copy link gives you the address to send round.
Editing a published form is safe. Your changes stay in the builder until you publish again, and each response remembers the version of the form it was filled in on, so an older response still reads correctly after you’ve reworded a question.
Unpublish takes the form offline (anyone following the link sees that it isn’t available), and keeps every response it has had.
Reading the responses
The Submissions action on a form opens its responses. The Responses tab lists each one with when it was submitted, its status, who it came from and where its file went, and opening one shows the answers, the language it was filled in, and an Activity timeline of everything that happened to it afterwards (file written, fields filled in, signature requested). Export CSV downloads the lot.
The Recipients tab, on a restricted form, shows who has responded, who has opened it without submitting, and who hasn’t started, with Remind and Revoke beside each.
Forms in other languages
Under Languages, choose Add a language…, then either Translate to have AI translate the form for you, or Edit to type the translations yourself (or tidy up the AI’s). Translating only fills in what’s missing, so it never overwrites something you’ve corrected.
Respondents see the form in their browser’s language if you’ve added it, can switch with the globe at the top, and right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are laid out the right way round. Whatever language someone fills it in, the answers arrive in yours, labelled with the language they used.
Translating needs AI to be set up on your Foldr; without it, the translations have to be entered by hand.
A couple of things worth knowing
A form that’s full or past its closing date still says Published in your list, because it is; it just isn’t accepting anything. If people report that they can’t submit, check Schedule & limits before anything else.
And if the share you picked as the destination is later removed or can’t be reached, responses carry on being recorded in Foldr but their files can’t be written, and the form won’t warn you about it. It’s worth glancing at the Output column in Submissions now and then on a form that matters.