Publishing forms
Your form is ready to go? Great! We can now proceed to the next step, which is publishing your form. This step is necessary for your form to become public, which means it can then be accessed by a link or by being embedded in a web page.
If you make changes to a form that is already published, then you must publish your form again to apply the changes you have made. This has the advantage of giving you all the time you need to work on your form, with changes only going live when you decide to republish the form.
In this post, we explain how to publish a form and what you need to remember when doing so. You’ll also find out what happens to a published form when you make changes to it later.
Publishing a form
You need to publish your form to make it publicly available.
- Click Forms on the top menu bar.
- Find the form that you want to publish.
- Click the form name.
The form is opened in the Editor. - To publish the form, click Publish at the top right of the screen.
You have now published your form. The form now has the Published status. You can now share your form to receive form submissions.
Why can’t I publish my form?
When you edit a form in the Editor, all of the elements that you use in your form are validated in real time. When you make edits, this means that checks are made to ensure that you have met the necessary requirements – such as required fields, for example. These checks ensure that form users are always given a fully functional form.
If any elements have errors or are incomplete, you will not be able to publish the form.
A bell icon is also shown in the Editor, indicating the current state of the form. If the form has errors, the bell is coloured red and the number of errors is displayed.
To correct these errors, proceed as follows:
- Click the red bell icon.
A dialog window opens, listing all of the errors present in the form. - Click an error.
This takes you directly to the corresponding form element. - Correct the error.
- Then go back to step 1 and correct all of the other errors.
- Once you have corrected all of the errors, you can then publish the form. To do so, click Publish at the top right of the screen.
Unpublished changes
Changes that you make to a published form are not themselves published automatically. So you can work on your form without any worries. As soon as you start editing a published form, the form status changes from Published to Unpublished changes.
The status of your form is shown to you in two different places. You can either check the Status column in the Forms area or you can go to the Editor itself. In the Editor, the publish button at the top right of the screen changes to green to show you that changes have been made.
These changes are only applied when you publish the form again.
- Click Forms on the top menu bar.
- Find the form that you want to publish.
- Click the form name.
The form is opened in the Editor. - To publish the form, click Publish changes at the top right of the screen.
You have now published the changes and these are now live.
You can also publish a form with unpublished changes from the Forms area. To do so, click the context menu link under Actions and then click Publish.
How do I know if my form has been published?
You can check whether your form has been published in two places: in the Forms area and in the Editor itself.
Forms area
- Click Forms on the top menu bar. You can check the Status column to see which forms have been published. Published forms have either the status Published or Unpublished changes.
Editor
- If the button at the top right shows Published, then the form is published.
- If the button at the top right shows Publish changes, then changes have been made that have not yet been applied to the published form.
- If the button at the top right shows Publish, then the form has not yet been published. This form is therefore a draft.
For more information about the statuses that are possible for a form, please see the post Possible statuses for a form.
