PlatoForms User Guide
Ctrl+K

  • Form Builder

    Creating an Online Form for an Existing PDF

  • Custom Domain

    With Builder you can build three types of forms: online web forms, online PDF forms, and master forms.

  • Master Form Builder

    you will arrive at the Form Builder. On the form Builder, there are three main sections:

What's new? API Docs

Manage submissions and PDFs

On this page

In the Submissions tab, you can handle submissions and generated PDFs by selecting the Actions button in the submission data table’s respective row.

Click the Action button to manage submissions and pdfs

Open or download the PDF

  • Open PDF opens the filled PDF in a new browser tab (Web Forms and PDF forms).
  • View PDF (Master Forms) lists each linked PDF with its own View PDF link. When the master form merges its PDFs, the merged PDF is listed first; with Delete individual PDFs after merging on, only the merged PDF is listed.
  • Download PDF downloads the filled PDF. For a Master Form, it downloads a zip of all its PDFs, or only the merged PDF when Delete individual PDFs after merging is on.

When the PDF could not be created, the row’s PDF Creation Failure column shows why. Open PDF, View PDF, Download PDF and Share … are then not offered; Re-Submit Form, Revisions … and Delete still are. Re-submitting the form clears the failure.

Re-submit form

Click Re-Submit Form to access the populated form with submission data. Make changes and resubmit.

Note

Re-Submit Form is for your team. You need the form’s Form Submission Viewer permission, and also Form Submitter when the form’s submitters are restricted, and you must be signed in to PlatoForms in the form’s team. It only opens while the form is published, has not passed its Form expired at time, has reached its Form available at time, and is not invitation-only. To let someone outside your team edit a submission, use the edit link from Share … instead.

View submission revisions

If a submission is resubmitted, our system records and saves updates as versions. Click Revisions … to see the earlier versions of the submission, download the generated PDF for each of them, and get each one’s CSV file. The current version is the row itself and is not repeated in the list.

See revision history

Click Share … to generate sharing links for the generated PDF, form attachments, or to open this submission with pre-filled data. The Attachments Links table also lists the signature certificate (when there is one) and a CSV file of the answers. These links are accessible to anyone with the URL, and no login is needed. Each link shows its Expiry date, or Never.

Manage sharing links

New links expire after the form’s Expiration Time for Shared URLs (Edit Form, PDF, Attachments etc.) (default 7 days), and with Shared URLs are passcode protected on, every link asks for a passcode first. Both settings are in the form’s General settings > Privacy & Security, and the window shows the passcode when there is one.

Reset Sharing replaces every link of this submission with new ones that expire after the period you choose (1, 3, 7, 15, 30, 60, 90 or 180 days, or Never expire). All earlier links of the submission stop working at once, including links already sent in emails.

Once a link has expired, it never works again. When the submission needs a link again, it gets a new link with a different address and a fresh expiry. Links returned by the API and sent in webhook payloads keep their current expiry: delivering a submission does not extend it.

You can deactivate sharing by clicking Stop Sharing. Every link of the submission stops working, and links that were stopped never work again. The thank-you page offers the Edit Submission link only while sharing is on for that submission, so after Stop Sharing it no longer shows it.

Form settings

Sharing is not blocked for good, though: new links, with new addresses, are created in these cases:

  • When configuring Notifications, you included variables in the Email Body, such as {{shared_editor_link}}, {{shared_pdf_link}}, or {{shared_attachment_link}}. A later email, or an integration that posts links, creates new working links.

    Sharing link variables

  • When you employed APIs such as Create PDF Sharing URL, Create Attachment Sharing URL, and Create Edit Form Submission Sharing URL to create sharing URLs for PDF or attachment downloads and form submission editing, no authentication is needed. These API requests also turn sharing back on.

Caution

If the form submission must remain confidential, use shared links with caution. Resetting sharing with a shorter expiration date is recommended.

Delete submissions

Click Delete in the Actions menu, then Remove to confirm. Deleting is permanent and cannot be undone: there is no Trash for submissions. It removes the submission and all its revisions, its PDFs, its signature certificate, its uploaded files and its share links. The deletion is recorded in the Activity Log.

Deleting does not reduce the submission count of your plan usage. Copies that already left PlatoForms, such as emailed PDFs, files in a cloud drive, rows in Google Sheets or data sent by webhooks, are not removed.

Bulk delete and download

Tick the checkboxes of the rows you want (up to 100 at a time). The table heading then shows two icons:

  • Delete selected permanently deletes the selected submissions, the same way as Delete.
  • Export selected downloads the PDFs of the selected submissions, optionally with Include submission attachments and Include submission CSV. For PDF forms and Master Forms the zip downloads straight away. For Web Forms (up to 30 submissions at a time) the PDFs are prepared in the background and you receive an email when they are ready.

For a date range or custom CSV and PDF settings, use Export instead.

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