FAQ- Form Connectors

FAQ- Form Connectors

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Q: Why is my connector not applying to older versions of my form?

A: Connectors are version-specific. The connector settings for one form version do not apply to other versions of the form. If you want to change the settings of a specific version of the form, navigate the form Settings page, click on a different version (under Versions on the right-hand pane), and then return to the connectors page to make adjustments.

Bear in mind that the logic for each version resides on the server rather than the local device. Devices don't need to be force synced for connector changes to take effect; as long as the connector is saved and applies to the version of the form being submitted, that version's saved connector will fire as soon as the submission hits the server.


Q: Is it possible to connect a form to an Excel spreadsheet on Google Drive, One Drive or Dropbox so that each time a form is filled out on the device, it adds a line to the same spreadsheet?

A: Our Google Spreadsheet connector currently supports this scenario, in that we append rows to the same Google Spreadsheet. When you create new versions of your form, we continue to append rows to the same worksheet, just adding missing columns as needed.

For the Excel side on Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., we do not currently support appending rows. This is because if we did so, we would have to download the file each time first in order to append the row, then upload it back to the storage location. When there are many entries coming in, often concurrently, this rapidly becomes very problematic. Google Spreadsheet does not have this problem because we are able to add rows through a programming interface (called an API) instead of downloading the spreadsheet each time.

Microsoft is said to be launching new APIs in the future that will match Google Spreadsheet. If/when this happens, we will look to add appending support for One Drive and Office 365.

See also:
Displaying & Updating Data Rows from/to An External System


Q: How can I prevent signatures from being sent by a connector that is set to send media files separately? Can they be excluded?

A: Yes! For any field with media that you wish to exclude, like signatures, just tick the checkbox for "Is Personal Data" in the form designer and then also tick the "Anonymize Personal Data" checkbox on the form connector. These fields marked as anonymous will not be sent along with other media by the form connector when the connector fires.

Note: this will also exclude this data from appearing on output template.



Q: Why is the file name for my form connector not being accepted?

A: Be sure to omit any hashtag (#) characters from the file name! These are not accepted by OneDrive, and possibly other online storage services as well. Also make sure that the file name does not begin with a space, for the same reason; this may happen if the file name is generated by a concatenation of data names and the first data name contains no data for the submission.


Q: How do I preserve line breaks in the body of a connector with custom CSS?

A: In order to maintain the line breaks in a field's data on an output that uses custom CSS, you'll need to add the code below to the CSS styling for the most specific element that holds the multi-line field:

white-space: pre-wrap

This will ensure that text outputs with the same line breaks given by the user's input -- e.g.,

Line 1

Line 2

Line 3


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