Foldr Forms lets people in your organisation build a form, publish it to a public link or to named people, and have every response filed as a record (and, if they like, as a document on one of your shares). Building and publishing happen in the web app and belong to whoever you let build forms. Your part as an administrator is deciding who that is, what their forms are allowed to reach, and keeping an eye on the result.
This article describes Foldr 11.1. For the builder’s side of things, see Building and publishing a form.
What you’ll need before you start
A Forms licence. On Foldr Cloud, Forms is included in the Business and Enterprise plans. On the appliance it comes with a Folio licence, or on its own as a Forms licence (the Forms licence on its own doesn’t bring Folio or Sign with it). If Forms doesn’t appear under Scripting in Foldr Settings, it isn’t licensed yet, so get in touch and we’ll sort out a trial or add it.
A share for responses, if you want files. Every response is kept as a record you can view and export whether or not it’s written anywhere, but most people want a file on a share as well. Any share will do, as long as the people building forms can write to it.
That’s genuinely all. Forms needs no search, no AI and no service account to work, although AI makes the translation button useful and search makes response files findable.
If the licence ever lapses, forms that are already published keep working: people can still fill them in and they still turn up under Shared with me. What stops is building and editing.
Who can build forms?
Nobody, until you say so. There’s no default grant, so the first job is Foldr Settings > Scripting > Forms > Permissions, where three separate lists live:
- Create forms. Build, edit and publish forms. Publishing comes with building; there’s no separate permission for it.
- Create public forms. Make a form that anyone with the link can fill in, without signing in. Without this, a builder’s forms are always restricted to the people and groups they name, and the public option simply doesn’t appear.
- Invite external recipients to forms. Send a form to an email address outside your directory. Doing so creates an external account for that person, which is why it’s a separate decision.
Each list takes people and groups. A sensible starting point is Create forms for the teams who actually collect things (the office, HR, admissions, facilities), and Create public forms for a much smaller group, because a public form is a page on the internet with your name on it.
People who’ve been granted Create forms find a Forms tab under Shared by me in the web app. Nobody else sees it, and builders only ever see their own forms there.
If you delegate settings to other administrators, the Forms page in Settings needs its own admin permission, Configure Forms (builders and data sources), which is off by default.
Data sources, or what a form may look up
A form can do more than collect typed answers. A Lookup question can fill its options from somewhere else (a list of sites, cost codes, courses, products), a table column can look values up as someone types, and a button can run an automation part-way through the form. All of those are powered by MaSH automations, and a builder can only use one that you’ve approved.
On Foldr Settings > Scripting > Forms > Data sources, every automation on your Foldr is listed with a Usable in forms switch. Turn it on for the ones builders should be offered, and optionally give each a Label shown to builders (otherwise they see the automation’s own name).
It’s worth a moment’s thought before you switch one on, because the approval is the whole control. Builders are ordinary users, and an approved automation runs with its full abilities whoever’s form calls it. On a public form it runs as the form’s owner; on a restricted form it runs as the person filling it in. So approve automations that were written to be called this way, rather than every useful script you happen to have.
If no sources are approved, builders see a note in the builder asking them to ask an administrator, which is a perfectly fine state to leave things in until somebody needs one.
Letting a form save answers into custom fields
A builder can set any question to Save to field, which writes the answer onto the response file as a custom field value. That makes responses searchable and sortable by the things that matter (a department, a reference number, a person) rather than just by file name.
It only works for fields you’ve allowed. For each share and custom field, open Shares, choose the share, open the custom field and switch on Let forms save an answer to this field under Forms. A field that isn’t switched on here isn’t offered in the builder, and it’s checked again on every response, so turning it off later takes effect straight away. Custom Fields covers creating the fields themselves.
If a form’s responses will ever need signing off by someone, this step isn’t optional: an approval on a form needs at least one answer saved to a field.
Keeping an eye on things
Foldr Settings > Scripting > Forms > Forms lists every form on your Foldr, whoever owns it, with its status, how many responses it has had and when it last changed. Two actions matter:
- Reassign owner hands a form to somebody else, which is the thing you’ll need when its builder leaves. It changes who can edit the form, not who can fill it in.
- Delete form takes a form away for good as far as its builder is concerned. Its responses and any files they wrote are kept, and support can restore the form itself if it was a mistake.
Submissions also appear in Monitoring > Activity as a Form submission trail report, and each response carries its own activity timeline in the builder’s Submissions view (submitted, file written, fields filled in, signature requested and so on).
What you can’t change (yet)
We’ll be honest about two things people tend to look for and not find.
The emails Forms sends (the invitation and its reminders, the new-response notice, the receipt to the person who responded, and the note when a form is shared with a colleague) use built-in wording and don’t appear under Notifications in Settings, so you can’t edit them there. Their subjects name the form and, where there is one, the person who sent it.
A few limits are fixed rather than configurable: 25 MB per uploaded file, at most three automatic reminders per invited person, and a 4 MB ceiling on the form itself (which only matters if a builder embeds a lot of large pictures). Unfinished responses are tidied up on a fixed timetable too: files uploaded to a form that’s never submitted are cleared away, from the share and from search, after a day without activity, and a response saved to finish later is kept for 30 days after its last save.
Moving forms between Foldrs
Forms travel in Flow bundles, along with the data sources they use, who they’re shared with and any approval rule attached to them. Responses don’t travel. An imported form always arrives as a draft owned by the administrator who imported it, so it has to be looked over and published again before anyone can fill it in.
One thing to know before you import a bundle from somewhere you don’t control: the automations a bundled form uses are approved as data sources on your Foldr as part of the import. That’s what makes the form work straight away, and it’s also why the import preview lists them.