Publishing a Form

• Publish a Form
• First Publish
• Publishing Updates
• Ensure users can submit
• Can I Unpublish a Form

Publish a Form

Until you publish your app/product and as long as the yellow Draft flag is visible at the top left of the screen within the app:

Any changes you have made to your app will not be visible to submitters.

To publish your form click on the Publish button at the top right of the page

First Publish

If this is your first time publishing, more than likely you won't have any errors to correct, and you will see a screen similar to the picture below.  Prior to publish there are the below two options that can be selected prior to the initial publish:

• Show saved drafts in Document List:  If this setting is enabled, anyone who sees the Document List will be able to see drafts of documents that people have saved but not yet submitted.  Once set it can not be undone.
• Turn off form versioning:  Checking this box will turn off form versioning.  Any changes you make to your form will automatically apply to all documents when they are published.  This setting can be used in forms used for internal purposes or as data repositories (via Data Sharing) that don't require workflow routing.  The versionless form setting is also applied to all General App Data in next generation products. This setting is currently incompatible with workflows so if you have already configured a workflow this option will be greyed out and cannot be selected on initial publish.  Similarly, if you publish with this setting enabled the Workflow tab in the app will no longer be available.  Also, when enabled and published the Dashboard tab is no longer available since that tracks submission stats for end user forms.  

Note:  These options can be configured only during the initial publish. After the form is published, they become read-only and appear grayed out in the Publish tab.

Also, please refer to the How and Where to Test Your App or Product Before Going Live article for some guidance and best practices when deploying an app.

Publishing Updates

If you have previously published your app/product and are making changes to it, the Publish page will display a summary of changes you have made to this draft, and it will show any errors that need to be corrected.

Until all errors are resolved, you will be unable to publish your form.

Note: Any form/workflow changes that are published for an app will only be applied to new documents going forward and any draft documents that had never been submitted.  For draft documents, users will get the below 'The form is out of date...' prompt to update their form the next time they enter the document.  Please be aware that fields removed from the form will then be removed from the document when applied. 

 If the document had already been submitted at any time prior to these changes being published (even if the document was returned) it will not update to the new form/workflow but remain on the published version it was originally associated. 

Steps to take to ensure users can submit forms

Even though you have published your form from the publish page, your form may still not be visible to your users. To ensure your users can see your form, make sure you take the following actions:

• Click the Publish button from the Publish screen in your app.
• Adjust your app/product permissions to ensure your users have the form shared with them. See the Form Permissions article for more information.
• Share the link to your form. See the Sharing an App/Product article for more information. 

Once those three things are done, your users can begin submitting forms.

Can I Unpublish a Form?

Once a form is published you can't undo the publish action.  However, you can always remove access to the published form via the Form Permissions so end users will no longer have access.  You can also Delete an App if you no longer want it to display or it will no longer be used.  Alternatively, if you want to limit when users can submit new documents, disable submissions entirely, or limit the number of submissions per user you can configure that in Submission Settings found in Form Settings.