Whether you have decided to make some small changes, or are overhauling a form between application periods, the possibility of losing currently submitted information as a result of form changes can sometimes lead to cluttered workflows and reports. This guide aims to help administrators know what they can and cannot safely edit within a live form during and after data collection.
In this Article...
- What is a Live Form?
- How is Information Stored?
- What can I alter safely?
- What changes will negatively impact my form
- Conditional Changes
- Adding a New Question in a Live Form
- Steps to Changing a Question Type in a Live Form
A live form is a form that has collected data at any point in the lifecycle of your site. Regardless if those responses belong to applicants that are currently accessing your site, applicants that completed the form in a previous year, or test submissions you created as an administrator to test the form.
Once your form is live and has available responses you will see a warning on the page. In order to get in and make changes to the form, you must click on the "I Agree" button present there, which signifies you understand information can be lost under circumstances detailed above.
As long as you are making appropriate changes, or if you have not gathered any live data for that form, you can absolutely hit that 'I Agree' button and make any changes necessary!
The reason we caution against making major changes to a form as detailed below is because each response that a user gives is stored within the form and within each individual question and choice.
For example, within a form you have a question "What is your favourite colour?" and you have a dropdown with a list of colour choices. If the applicant selects "Blue" as their response, that response is stored within the specific choice of the dropdown. For example:
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So when you are pulling reports or piping information to an email or form, that response is retrievable through the choice selected.
If you were to then remove Blue as an option from the list, that applicant's response would also be deleted and would not be available as the labels would shift to meet the new choices available:
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If you were to pull a report you may notice that depending on where the choice was in the list, the response will either be blank, or perhaps the data would be skewed and you may actually see a different colour as the selection of the user. For example, as Green has now become the label for Choice 2, and our applicant has selected Choice 2 as their response, the response in the site would now be Green which is inaccurate information.
The same would occur if you were to delete the entire question from the form. As there is no longer a question in the site to store the data that information would no longer be accessible within the site.
Firstly, editing the contents of a form will not prevent your applicants from accessing or completing the form. In cases where applicants have already completed the form you are making changes to, the complete status will be retained through changes.
When you are making alterations to the contents of a form, here are some examples of harmless actions:
- Adding a completely new question to any page
- Applying Options or Display settings to an existing question (i.e. sort alphabetically)
- Moving whole questions within the same page (contents of a question should not be reorganized)
- Re-ordering pages
- Editing styling to the form or question (e.g. font size, width, etc.)
- Editing text descriptions (e.g. Updating dates/years within your question titles and descriptions, correcting typos)
- Editing/Removing Section Headings
Here is a list of absolutely "do not do's" for form editing. The changes below have the ability to remove your data, and while in some cases changes can be reverted, this is not always the case and can cause even more issues to arise.
| Deleting questions or individual question choices |
WARNING! This will delete existing responses to the question |
| Editing choice/variable labels |
WARNING! When you update a choice or variable label, it will automatically update every application where that choice is selected so that the new text is reflected. In some cases, this is fine - like fixing a typo, but refrain from making full list updates. In this case a new question or a duplicate of the form is most beneficial. You can refer above to How is Information Stored for more information. |
| Deleting current choices/variables |
WARNING! This kind of change will cause a shift in your collected data. When a choice is deleted, all choice options after it bump up to fill the gap. Someone who correctly selects the label for Choice 2, may end up with what Choice 3 was previously labeled as, when you go to export results or perform reviews. |
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Changing a question's type |
WARNING! When editing a form you may have seen the "Question Type" dropdown. When changing questions from one type to another, you are also changing how we interpret the responses internally. For example Multiple Choice and Check questions are both lists, however Checkboxes are evaluated differently because of the fact multiple selections can be given per question. This will affect how the results are exported, but can be reversed. |
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Editing a Drill-Down Question |
WARNING! Changes made to a drill down question (such as adding/removing choices) will cause a shift in your collected data. Drill-Downs are stored as one consolidated list, therefore deleting options in any list will cause the entire list to shift up to fill the gap. Adding a new option will cause the list to shift down to accommodate the change. If you anticipate making changes regularly, consider using a different question type. |
NOTE: In the case that you need to make one of these changes within a form, we would recommend following our steps to Archive a task to Preserve the Collected Data. This process will allow you to make the necessary changes without losing your data in the site.
Some changes to forms can be considered safe, or cause issues, depending on how you apply them. The most common examples of this is:
Adding a new choice or variable to an existing question
SAFE USE: When you add a new choice or variable to an existing question at the very end of a list, it will be integrated into the question without issue. WARNING! Drill-Down question types are an exception to this rule. Please refer to What changes will negatively impact my form?
TIP! If you wish for your choices to be in Alphabetical order select the option for Alphabetize Choices. This will maintain the correct order on the back end but display the choices in Alphabetical order to the applicants.
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DO NOT DO: Add a choice or variable to the middle of the list. There is a unique way our system interprets choices entered in closed ended questions that can cause the data to be skewed if the choice is added to the middle of the choice list. As described above in How is Information is Stored, the selections that the users make are based on the Choice number (i.e. Choice 2) and not the label ("Blue"). Therefore, if you add a new choice above "Choice 2: Blue," Blue will now become the 3rd choice in the list.
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Creating and removing Branching Logic from forms
SAFE USE: Branching logic can be set up through your form's "Page" tab. A page can contain an unlimited number of custom rules, created by setting a condition and an action. Your conditions are based off of applicant input (responses to questions in the form) and the actions cover a wide variety of results. For example you can; hide or show relevant questions, force the applicant to navigate through a specific set of pages, send an e-mail to the applicant while including their form responses, or mark questions as invalid based on incorrect or insufficient responses.
It is important to be mindful of 'loops' in your branching, however. If something is set up in such a way that applicants can not navigate forward (i.e. marking a required question as invalid entry regardless if it does or does not have a response) it will completely prevent your applicants from moving forward, and can be a very frustrating experience. We do not check for these kinds of loops, so you will still be able to save the form if they are present.
DO NOT DO: it is very important to keep in mind that branching can only exist because of the questions and content of your form. If you need to delete questions or choices, always make sure to remove branching logic prior to the form change, as it can have some undesired effects on accessibility. Additionally, keep in mind that a 'branching loop' can also cause issues. This is when one branching rule is attempting to perform conflicting actions. For example if I try to both hide and show a task as a result of the same condition, the form will not know what action to take.
NOTE: In the case that you need to make one of the "Do not do" changes within a form, we would recommend following our steps to Archive a task to Preserve the Collected Data. This process will allow you to make the necessary changes without losing your data in the site.
New questions can be safely added to a form without affecting previously collected data. For more information on how to add a question please refer to How to Add a Question.
NOTE: When you perform this action on a form that already has collected live responses, any user that has completed this task previously will not be asked to come back to the form and update their response. It will remain under the 'Complete' status, and the user will not automatically be informed a change in the form has taken place.
Should an applicant need to go back and fill that out, we would recommend contacting the applicant and informing them of the change.
As mentioned above, once a question has received responses you cannot change its Type (eg. Text Response, Multiple Choice, etc.) without losing the previous response data. In the case a question type must be changed, you are still capable of making this change, there is no restriction on your ability to do so. In such circumstances, we recommend the following process:
- Export your data (Submission Report) so you have the most current copy of your responses.
- Delete the question from the Editor
WARNING! This will delete responses linked to that current question. - Re-create the brand new question.
- Manually re-enter the responses.