Publishing a form

A form is a view of a table, like Grid or Calendar — except it writes records instead of reading them. Drag the questions you want onto a live preview, switch it on, and the link at /f/… takes submissions from anyone at all, with no account and nothing to install. Add a Form view Open the table and click + View → Form in the view switcher. RowFold mints the public link there and then and starts the form with every fillable field already on it, in the table's own order — the usual job is everything except a couple of internal fields, and a form with nothing on it renders as the closed page, which reads as broken. It arrives switched off. Creating a view must never quietly open a public write endpoint on your data, so nothing is reachable until you tick Accepting submissions and save. Design it in three panes The designer is one screen with three columns. Fields on the left is everything the form could ask: click a chip to append it, or drag it to land exactly where you drop it. The form in the middle is the form itself — drag ⠿ to reorder, click a row to configure it, press × to take it off. Settings on the right shows whichever field is selected, or the whole form's settings when none is. Every row draws the real control the visitor gets — a date picker for a Date, a multi-select for a Multi-select, a dropzone for an Attachment — so there is no separate preview mode to keep in step with the thing itself. The title, the intro paragraph and the submit button's label are edited in place on the canvas. Per question you can set the Question wording (blank uses the field's own name), Help text underneath it, and Required. Ask only what's relevant Any question can be conditional. Select it, set When to ask to Only when …, and list the answers that reveal it under …matching, comma-separated — Bug, Outage. Only Select, Multi-select and Yes/No questions can be the trigger, and only ones sitting above the field they control; drag a field above its source and the condition is dropped there and then rather than being discarded silently when you save. The rule is enforced again on the server at submit. A question the conditions hid cannot block the submission, and an answer forced into it is thrown away — the browser's idea of which questions exist is never trusted. What can't be asked publicly Under the palette, a collapsed line tells you how many fields can never appear on the form; open it and each one is named with the reason why. Relation is out because a public picker would broadcast the linked table's record names to the internet; Lookup and Rollup are calculated from linked records; Auto number assigns itself on submit; People means nothing to someone outside the workspace. Everything else is fair game — text, long text, numbers, currency, percent, rating, progress, dates, yes/no, choices, email, URL, phone, address and file uploads. Collect files Put an Attachment field on the form and visitors get a dropzone: up to 10 files of 10 MB each, uploading as they are picked so a large file never stalls the submit button. Files are parked until the submission actually happens, and the browser is handed nothing but opaque ids — the name, size and type that end up on the record are read back from RowFold's own rows at submit, so a borrowed or invented id resolves to nothing rather than to a stranger's file. Anything picked and then abandoned is deleted, bytes included, about six hours later. Name the record, then go live In Form settings, Record name comes from decides which answer titles the record in the grid — choose the one you would scan a queue by. After submitting is the confirmation the visitor reads. After submitting, go to replaces that card with a redirect to a page of your own, and must be a full http:// or https:// address. The bar above the designer carries the rest: the live URL with Copy link and Open ↗, a live or closed chip, the submission count and the date of the last one, the Accepting submissions switch, and Save form. Saving publishes at once — the live link serves the new version on the next load. Who hears about a submission Three independent channels, because who gets told has three different answers in practice. • Notify — tick the workspace people who work this queue. They get a RowFold notification, and an email if their own notification settings say so, so one person's preferences govern everything rather than forms keeping private rules. • Also watch each new record — the same people join the new record's watch list, so they hear about replies and status changes too, not just the arrival. This is what turns a form into the front door of a queue. • Also email — one address outside RowFold, a shared support@ inbox or an on-call alias. It is independent of the people list, not a fallback for it. Submissions ride the same write path as everything else, so Auto number fields stamp themselves and this table's Record created automations fire exactly as though the record had been typed in by hand. Send the visitor a receipt Under Reply to the sender, point Acknowledgement at an Email field that is actually on the form — RowFold will not acknowledge to an address the form never asked for. The mail goes out in your account's branding, subject We received your …, and echoes their own answers back so it doubles as their copy. What it says overrides the wording; leaving it blank reuses the on-screen confirmation, which is usually the right thing to say. Tips • The middle pane is the preview — what you drag is what the visitor gets, so there is no preview mode to forget to check. • Renaming the form renames its view tab too, so a tab called Form can never end up pointing at Support intake. • Old <code>/Forms/Edit</code> links still work — they forward to the table's Form tab, adopting a view for forms that predate view tabs. • Point Record name comes from at a subject-style question rather than an email address; queues are far easier to scan that way. • Pause a form any time by clearing Accepting submissions — the link stops working, nothing is deleted, and the token is never reused either way. Good to know • A form with no fields included serves the same form is closed page as a switched-off one — the save message tells you when that has happened. • An unknown token and a switched-off form render identically, on purpose, so nobody can probe the URL space for forms that exist but are paused. • A conditional question can only depend on one above it; reordering that breaks the rule clears the condition rather than leaving a reference that would hide the question forever. • Relation fields are never offered on a public form, and no setting turns them on. • The after-submit redirect is refused unless it is an absolute <code>http://</code> or <code>https://</code> address — an unchecked value there would be an open redirect on an anonymous page. • Files a visitor picks but never submits are swept, bytes and all, about six hours later. Who can do what • Only workspace admins can create or edit a Form view — a public form is a standing anonymous write endpoint, not a personal preference about how to look at data. • Other members opening the Form tab see whether it is live and how many submissions it has taken, and nothing they can change. • The public page needs no account: the 22-character token in the link is its entire access control, so treat the URL as the secret it is. • Deleting a Form view deletes the form and kills its public link immediately — records already submitted are untouched, which is exactly what the confirmation says.