Collecting submissions of online forms designed with Plumsail Forms
Note
Data collection and storage is enabled by default for all forms that you create.
Activate submissions
The property is ON by default; if turned off, the data will not be processed in any way. You can disable it when testing and developing a form.
Save submissions
The property is ON by default; if turned off, the data from the form will not be saved to your account. It can still go to Power Automate or Zapier.
Submissions are stored indefinitely by default. In the form settings, you can define a period after which submissions are automatically deleted.
Saving drafts
You can allow users to save their unfinished forms as drafts:
This lets users save their progress and come back to finish their form later. When you enable this option, there are two ways your users can save their draft:
Using a built-in Save & Resume button in your shared form page, located outside the form.
Using a Save & Resume control you placed inside your form.
Note
Since users can only access their drafts through a public URL, your form must be approved.
When clicking on either of these buttons, a dialog will open, where they can save the draft link or send it to their email:
Drafts are not counted as submissions, but they take up storage space. Drafts are stored for 30 days by default, and you can adjust this period in the form settings:
Manage saved submissions and drafts
If you decide to save the data to your account, you can view it in Forms section of your Plumsail Account. Click on the form’s name to see its submissions:
You can switch between different views for submissions, drafts, and attachments:
After each submission, the data will be available in Plumsail Account, where you can see it or export it to CSV:
You can also select which fields should be displayed in this list and in what order, by clicking on the gear icon:
Hover over submission and click on the vertical ellipsis symbol to open the context menu:
There are several useful options available through this menu:
You can view the submission details in a separate modal dialog.
If you open the submission in a form, you can see all the data there, and there is also an option to export the form to PDF:
And this is what the submission source in JSON looks like:
Manage attachments
To see all of the attachments linked to the submissions, go to the Attachments view.
You can download attachments to your device and delete the attachments you don’t need.
Schedule submission removal
You can configure auto-removal of submissions from Plumsail Account and their attachments after a certain amount of days in each form’s settings:
Note
If submissions are deleted, there is no way to restore them.
Archive form
If you want to stop gathering submissions, you can archive the form. When users open the form, they will see a message that the form is unavailable.
You can activate the form at any time:
