Template Versioning: Publish Updates to Your Form Templates While Maintaining Historical Data

Publish updates to your form Templates while protecting data collected within previous versions, with Template Versioning

Template Versioning allows users to Publish updates to their form Templates. Each time a Template is Published, a new version becomes available for future forms to be created from. These published changes do not impact forms created from the original version of the Template.

This functionality is especially useful as it allows users to optimize their Templates as needed, without risking the loss of data saved within forms generated from earlier versions of the Template. For example, without Template Versioning enabled, if a user were to delete several fields within a Template they run the risk of losing data previously captured within those fields. 

“Save Draft” 
Template Versioning also allows users to edit their form and save it as a draft, empowering them to optimize their Templates at their leisure, without losing their changes or publishing before they are ready to do so. We highly recommend regularly saving your draft while making changes to your Template.

Preview changes
This functionality also allows users to Preview their changes within the Web Form Editor. For example, if you were to make a Signature field Required, in the Preview editor you would have the opportunity to test this functionality. This feature allows users to fully test changes to their Template, before Publishing account-wide. 

Publish changes
Once you have saved and previewed your changes, you can confidently Publish a new version of your template. With your edits Published, new forms utilizing said Template will include these modifications while filling out their forms. Meanwhile, any data collected within previous versions of the Template will remain untouched and available within your account. 

Frequently Asked Questions

When I publish a new version, will my existing forms be updated too?
Published changes do not impact forms created from a previous version of the template. Rather, each form will maintain the same version of the published template available at the time the form was created.

This functionality is especially useful as it allows users to optimize their templates as needed, without risking the loss of data saved within forms generated from earlier versions of the template.

Note: This is a change from how GoFormz templates have worked in the past. Without Template Versioning enabled, any changes made to your template would automatically update all existing forms if they are edited or reopened from a Completed state.

Does saving a draft create a new version?
No, a new version of your template is only created when you select the Publish button in the Template Editor. This also means that Form Users will not be able to access any changes that have been saved as a draft and not published.

How Does Template Versioning affect the Reporting Tool?
The GoFormz Reporting tool will always report on the latest published version of the template. For example, if a field is deleted from the template and a new version is published, the reporting tool will only include the fields that exist on this new version, not the fields that existed in previous versions.

When template versioning is enabled, what version will my templates start at? How will the version increment?
Once Template Versioning is enabled, all templates in your account will begin at Version 1 regardless of any number of changes you have made in the past. As new versions of the form are published, your template versions will increment by one whole number (Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, etc.)

Can you revert to a previous version of a template?
At this time, you cannot revert to a previous version of a template once it is published. You must Publish a new version of that template to deploy changes to your Form Users.

If I publish a new version of the template, will my workflow still trigger if a form is using a previous template version?
Workflows will continue to trigger when a form is completed from any version of the chosen template. However, if a field name is changed from one version to the next and the workflow input is not updated to reference the new field name, it will only pull in data from the forms that use the old form name in the previous version.

For example, if you are referencing "Field A" of your template in a workflow and then change the name of the same field to "Field A-2", the workflow will NOT automatically update to this new name in the input section. It will still pull in data from forms that use the template version where the field was named "Field A" but it will not pull in data from new forms that are created from the template version where the field name is "Field A-2".

Have more questions? To learn more about Template Versioning check out this support article or reach out to us here.