Posts Tagged ‘automation’

Explore Form Results with Data Search

The Data Search function allows you to access past interactions with your customers, discover related form entries, and explore form data collected in your account.

Search Online Form Submissions

When we create just about any online forms other than anonymous surveys, we ask users to provide their contact details so we can reply. That makes email addresses and phone numbers almost universal identifiers for the individual or organization associated with a form submission.

The Search function allows you to look up form responses by email address or phone number across all your forms. FormSmarts considers all email addresses and phone numbers present on a form, as long as you set the corresponding input field to the email or phone datatype.

Which Processes Could Benefit From Search?

We anticipate many customers will start using this feature in their daily workflows to:

We plan to further develop this tool to include additional options to search by tag, dates, and customer-defined ID. If you have needs not covered by the current version, please let us know in the comments section.

Team Access: Results Depend on the User

FormSmarts has two types of members: account owners (admins) and invited users with whom they’ve shared online forms.

All users may search form entries, but invited users only see results if they have permissions to access aggregate form responses on a form. Note: the permission setting is somewhat confusingly named Generate Report in the User Dashboard.

Invited users can view the forms shared with them and the permission they were given in their account.

Searching Phone Numbers

When looking up a phone number, please be aware that:

  • A local number like (220) 222-2002 won’t match the same number with an international dialing code: +1 220 222 2002 and conversely
  • Phone number extensions are ignored.

Parting Thoughts on Automation

Although we only discussed the interactive Search page here, customers can also automate tasks with the Search API. The same applies to most FormSmarts features.

How to Integrate with FormSmarts API

The Event Notification API allows you to have FormSmarts send a machine processable ‘push’ notification message to a script on your website (or for that matter to any URL) to process the information that has just been submitted through one of your online forms. You can use the Event API (a.k.a. Web Hooks) to integrate FormSmarts with your database, website or any online service or application.

How to Integrate

Whereas this feature is mainly targeted at developers, creating a script that does something useful with the data received from FormSmarts is actually not difficult. The API is fully documented with examples in PHP.

  • You first need to create a program/script to process form data and upload it to your web server. Data is sent in JSON format, which is supported natively by all modern programming languages.
  • Then register the script’s URL with FromSmarts
  • Whenever a form is submitted, FormSmarts will send the data submitted through the form as well as other data pertaining to the form response (e.g. payment information if the form involves a payment) to the URL you have registered.

Have a Great Idea?

If you have a great idea about how you could use FormSmarts API, let us know: we have several Business Starter subscriptions to give away.

About the Form Builder Blog

The Online Form Builder Blog is published by FormSmarts, a web form service providing all you need to create a form and publish it online in minutes. FormSmarts makes it easy to build a form and embed it on your site. You can then get form submissions by email or store them on FormSmarts and download an Excel report. Learn more about the many other benefits of FormSmarts.