Question

Feature Request - Forms Version Publishing

Forms

Updated May 12, 2020

asked on July 20, 2017

Hello,

Forms have become far more complex in recent years, allowing for some really complex processes and great custom reporting in recent updates but with this, I have found some new challenges when making changes to a forms process.

One of the ways I use to publish changes was to work with duplicate forms processes and have a dev version and a prod version. The issue when publishing a new version is all the history and the reporting goes with the old version, which is an issue.

A Way that it could be solved is to allow versioning a Form allowing testing and editing without editing the live form. Once the test version is ready to go it would be nice to be able to then click a button to turn the developed form into the live version as it is a lot better than having to manually replicate changes on separate processes to ensure the reporting remains intact.

Also if there are issues with the new form this would also be a great way to be able to switch quickly back to previous stable versions of the forms process.

Based on the complexity of where forms have headed this type of functionality will better allow agile development on new processes, maintain reporting, and provide stability options.

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Replies

replied on July 20, 2017

Hi Armando,

This is definitely a good feature request and we have been working on a solution to this pain point. For an upcoming Forms release, we are working on a feature that will allow you to download a process, make changes to the process and test those changes, then upload the process to overwrite the previous one. This will allow you to make and test changes in a development environment, then overwrite the production process while maintaining any live instances and historical data.

We do understand that solution has some limitations and further down the road, we will be looking in to more robust versioning as you described.

Thanks for the feature request

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replied on July 20, 2017

No problem,

I assume that you could go back versions if required? Would you also be able to work on a seperate process and then upload it to another process to overwrite the changes? If I understood correctly that is what your implying?

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replied on July 20, 2017

To go back to a previous version, you would just overwrite the updated process with the one you initially downloaded before making any changes. You could store as many backup XML files as you'd like and just overwrite with the desired version.

As for the second question, this will be difficult with the initial implementation. To overwrite a process, we are using internal ids for each element so we programatically know which pieces of the new uploaded process match up with pieces of the existing process. If you have an existing process and want to overwrite a different process, the ids won't match and we have no way of programatically knowing which steps match up with which. You could, theoretically, manually update the ids in the XML to match the existing process, but this would be tedious and probably not serve as a viable solution.

Down the road, full versioning support should solve these painpoints.

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replied on July 21, 2017

Thanks Jared,

Looking forward to these changes.

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replied on April 2, 2018

Any updates regarding this request?

Currently it is really complicated to update a business process, we are forced to choose between creating a new BP and loosing all the history and statistics or option b, made the changes in our production environment; and neither one is correct.

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replied on April 2, 2018

Overwriting processes was included with Forms 10.3

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replied on May 12, 2020

Just chiming in on this, can I please echo the request for proper forms version tracking, similar to how workflow tracks versions. This is something which often comes up.

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Feature Request - Forms Version Publishing

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