Question

Make form unavailable during a certain time frame every day/week

Forms Discussions Administration Ideas How To

Updated March 31, 2022

asked on March 30, 2022 • Show version history

Hello,

I am wondering if there is a way to make Forms unavailable during a certain time frame. We have a situation where the users are filling out the forms early in the morning and between the time they open the form and when they hit submit, the server is being rebooted, causing them to lose the data they entered. As you can imagine, this causes a great amount of frustration. I have made the users aware that the server is rebooted during that time of the morning but many of them forget frequently. Is there any way to set the form link to pop up a message that says "the Form is unavailable at this time but will be available at x time?"

Thanks

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SELECTED ANSWER

replied on March 30, 2022

There's currently no easy way to do this. One option would be to have JavaScript on the form that checks the current time and hides the submit button, displays a message, etc. if it is during a time.

The problem you would probably run into (even if the scheduling was a built-in option) is like what's already happening, people could easily open the form before the window when it is available, but not hit submit until after the reboot in which case you would be in the exact same position.

I'd say that a more appropriate solution would be to change when the reboot occurs since it is obviously happening at a time when users are active, and that's never ideal.

We reboot our Forms server frequently, but we have that scheduled to occur around 2am when there is no activity from our internal Forms site, and rarely ever any activity on our DMZ instance.

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replied on March 30, 2022 • Show version history

Thank you! I'll pass this option on to our IT team.

I did try adding a timer catch event to keep the form from getting to the parallel gateway but I suspect it will not work due to the reboot, correct?

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replied on March 30, 2022

That's correct, if they try to submit while the server is rebooting the submission would never reach Forms, let alone the gateway condition.

Scenarios like this are precisely why we schedule reboots during off hours, or at least during non-peak hours for things that should be available close to 24/7.

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replied on March 30, 2022

I will second that. The ideal way to address this issue is to figure out how to have scheduled server restarts happen outside of business hours. Morning reboots are not a normal practice.

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replied on March 31, 2022

Is it just a certain form? Put a date/time field on the form and have it autofill with current date and time. If the date and time is within your timeframe, hide the rest of the form?

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Make form unavailable during a certain time frame every day/week

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