Redirecting outdated Forms links

asked on August 24, 2020 • Show version history

Something that has been a bit of a problem for us is people digging up an email sent to them from a Forms process, not realizing that links change, and trying to use it. This pulls up a read-only copy of the Form as it existed at the time, but our users get confused when they are unable to interact with this older, read-only copy.

Is there some way we can provide a message or notification that the link they used is out of date? Or redirect old links to a custom site, perhaps that user's inbox or some notification page of our own design?

Take this snippet, for example. I know it looks messy, but there's a lot of motion in there. The supervisor action, in particular, has a timer on it to move it along if they don't respond in time. If the supervisor does eventually come along and click the link they received, they get a read-only version of the form as it was that they can't interact with, and this kind of situation has led to confusion for many.

I can and do try to inform people of limited-time actions in the emails I send out, but people still get confused, and I'm looking for a more direct option.

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replied on August 24, 2020

Is the link to a starting form or a specific user task? If it's to a starting form, you could go back to that process and re-publish it, but replace the original starting form with a new form. That new form can have a message and link to where you want them to go. You could also use JS to hide the submit button so that form couldn't be submitted, or have the message start event go straight to an end event so the submission just ends immediately. In essence, turn back on that URL and use the starting form to provide the message.

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View 2 previous replies

replied on August 25, 2020

I see where you're going with that, but no; it's to a user task somewhere along the way after a Form has started. I'll edit my post to try and make it more clear.

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replied on August 25, 2020

I see. Well in short, if Forms sends out an email to a user task, then that user task gets cancelled by a timer, there isn't much you can do to get that emailed link back or make it work.

One thing you could consider is adding a link to the Forms Inbox on the email that's sent to the users. You could write something like "If the link to the task doesn't work, please use this link to access your Forms inbox to check on any current tasks". The user would click the task link, see that it's been cancelled, then at least have another link to click on to take them to the Forms Inbox which will show them any current tasks. You could even replace the link to the task with a link to the Inbox if you wanted to send everyone to the inbox instead of directly to a potentially cancelled task.

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replied on August 25, 2020

Okay. I already do that with a link to the inbox in each email. To be clear, I wasn't expecting to make an old link work; I know that's not a possibility. I was hoping there was some kind of server setting or something with a redirect option for expired links, or some way to add a notification at the top of the read-only page when an expired link is clicked. That would be a nice feature, but if it's not available, it's not available.

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replied on August 25, 2020

Hi Sean-

Not sure if it will work for your exact situation, but this JS may be useful. I had a Forms process where users would open unclaimed team tasks or a task that another users had claimed. Those forms would be presented as read-only, but I had a lot of custom buttons that were still active and would actually work, causing a lot of confusion/frustration when fields were read only or they found the submit button to be disabled.

This small block of code on the form was used to basically say "if this isn't the user's task, disable buttons". And then bail out and don't run all the extra JS that was in place.

Note that this was developed in Forms 10.2 and is still in use in Forms 10.3. I haven't tested it in 10.4, or your specific scenario.

if ($('.button-wrap .action-btn').length > 0)
  {
	console.log('claimed');
  }
  else 
  {
	console.log('not claimed');
	$( "button, input[type='button']" ).prop("disabled",true);
	return;
  }

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replied on August 26, 2020

This might be useful! I'll do some experimenting with this and see what we can do with it. Thanks Pieter!

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Redirecting outdated Forms links

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