New Help-Desk System

We have rolled out a new support portal (powered by Helpspot) . To request assistance, go to the Support tab and open a new support ticket. You can track the progress on your tickets on that same page. Tickets are automatically updated as we exchange emails so you won’t have to wonder whether your email was lost or overlooked. On our end this also greatly facilitates our job as we work on your request.

Salesforce Connector Update

Sandbox Support:

You can now test FormAssembly for AppExchange with your Salesforce sandbox. When setting up your connector, check the ’sandbox account’ option and enter your API credentials. Once you are ready to switch to your live organization, you simply need to uncheck the box, update the credentials and you’re all set.

Optional Salesforce Triggers:

By default, a new record will trigger any assignment or email rule defined in Salesforce. You can now choose to turn off the rules on a form by form basis.

Completed Translations

Thanks to the generous contributions of our users, we have recently updated the Japanese, German and Russians translations to ensure that all our advanced features are properly localized for these languages.

Remember that you can help us support new languages by submitting translations.

That’s all for today. As always you are more than welcome to send us your comments, here, in our customer forum or by email.

We decided to address this usability issue by providing a new tab called ‘Publish’. This tab contains all the information needed to start using your web form and this is the first thing you’ll see when you leave the Form Builder. The ‘Display & Processing’ tab has been renamed ‘Display Options’ and, without the publishing information, is now shorter.

We hope you’ll find this change helpful. Please feel free to comment on any usability issue you’ve encountered on FormAssembly.com.

Localization

We have taken great pride from the early days of FormAssembly.com in providing a multi-lingual service, with support for time zones, national character sets and localized forms in over 30 languages. Unfortunately, as we added new features, the number of untranslated texts has grown and translations are now incomplete for many of these languages.

To help us get back on tracks, we created a new localization page. If your language is not listed, or listed as incomplete, please submit your own translation. We would love to fully support as many languages as possible.

New Workflow feature

The idea behind this feature is to allow you to link several forms together, to be filled out in a predefined order. You could start, for instance, with a main application form and, depending on the answers given, follow up with a few supplementary forms.

This feature is still in its most basic form for now. We will be listening to your feedback to see where to take it. Note that this feature is available on the Professional plan only.

Form Builder Update

Customizable repeat link

If you are not familiar with the terminology, a repeatable section is a form field (or a group of form fields) that a respondent can duplicate to provide as many answers as needed. A good example is the employment history section of an online job application. One person might have just one previous job, while another may need to enter information for many different jobs.

When the ‘repeatable’ option is checked, FormAssembly automatically adds a link labeled ‘add another response’. The text of this link can now be easily customized in the Form Builder.

Bug fixes

We have also made several speed improvements and fixed a few bugs, some that occurred only with the latest release of the Safari browser.

Salesforce Connector Update

Better handling of repeated sections

You can now choose in the connector setup to either merge the data from a repeated section, or create multiple records. To explain this briefly, you could merge the repeatable employment history section of the example above into a single Salesforce field. A repeatable Attendee section on a registration form however can be more appropriately configured to create several Contact records, one for each individual.

Better control on dependent objects

When you create several Salesforce records from a single html form, the connector is usually able to determine how the records are related. For instance, if you create a new Case and a new Attachment, the connector will automatically link the Attachment record to the Case. This doesn’t work for all Salesforce objects though, so we added the new lookup mapping type to let you explicitly specify the relationship. We hope to enhance this feature to perform more complex lookup requests when creating or updating records in Salesforce.

That’s it for now. As always we welcome your feedback, either here using the commenting system or by email using the ‘Contact’ link above. Thank you!

The On-Site edition offers the same great features enjoyed by thousands of our online users, but you can run it on your own server and keep your data safe and private.

To learn more about FormAssembly On-Site, go to:
http://onsite.formassembly.com

Built on the latest version of FormAssembly.com, with its powerful Form Builder and plenty of incredible features, it lets you create or update any record in Salesforce with web forms. With a simple point&click interface you can create forms to capture new leads, update contacts, open cases, attach files, etc..

We are a Salesforce certified partner since January 2007. Salesforce features are available only in our Professional Plan for users with a Salesforce Unlimited, Enterprise or Professional Edition.

Here’s an overview of the latest improvements:

Work with any Salesforce Record

Our connector now works with any Salesforce object, including custom objects. It is aware of required fields, data types and object relationships. You can for instance create a Lead and link it to a Campaign (two different Salesforce objects), or create a Contact and add an Attachment, all with a single web-form.

Import a Form from Salesforce

Using the new import tool, it literally takes about 30 seconds to get a fully working web form that creates a new lead, case, or that custom object that took you so long to define in Salesforce.

Upsert Records in Salesforce

Upsert is a mechanism that allows you to insert or update a record in Salesforce based on a predefined key. This is how you can edit existing records or prevent duplicates. It’s as simple as checking a box in the connector set up to specify that you will be using, for instance, the record ID or an email address to uniquely identify the record.

Populate the Form with Salesforce Data

The counterpart of the upsert feature is the ability to populate your form with Salesforce data, from within your Salesforce account, using custom links or button. See our documentation for more information.

That’s it! Click here to visit our AppExchange listing and check out our test-drive!

Our website, blog and support forum may be momentarily unavailable around that time. We expect only a very short interruption of our form processing service (i.e. a few seconds while the web server software is restarting) .

I will post updates here as needed.

Thank you.

UPDATE: 10:45pm -  This maintenance is complete.

Prefill your Web Form Dynamically

You can now dynamically assign a value to any field in your form by adding specific parameters to the link that points to your form. To find the exact syntax for your form, login to your FormAssembly.com account, go to “My Forms” and click on the form you need to set up. This opens the form properties panel on the right-hand side. In the “Display & Processing” tab, click the “Show how to prefill form data dynamically” link.

Here’s an example to dynamically set the first and last name fields to ‘John Doe’:

http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/3503?tfa_FirstName=John&tfa_LastName=Doe

This information is also available in the Online Documentation, accessible from the “Support” tab.

Download files without login in

You can now allow the recipient of the notification to download the files that were submitted with your form without requiring a login. To do so, simply add the %%UNPROTECTED_FILE_LIST%% alias to your custom notification template. The files can be downloaded only using the specially crafted links included in the email. Use this option cautiously though, anyone who has access to the email will be able to download the corresponding files.

Excel/CSV Export Format Change for Repeated fields

When exporting data from a form with a repeated section, the additional data is now displayed on a different lines to better indicate separate information.

Here’s an example: This registration form contains a “repeatable” attendee section so that more than one person can be registered if needed. When exporting to Excel, the data will now looks like this:

By the way, you can also prefill repeated sections. Here’s another example:

http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/3503?tfa_FirstName[0]=John&tfa_LastName[0]=Doe&tfa_FirstName[1]=Johnna&tfa_LastName[1]=Doe&tfa_5047186866457[0]-RC=1

This might look a bit obscure, but you can find more information in the Online Documentation.

There’s more news for Salesforce users on our Professional Plan, but that will be the subject of a separate post.

We love to hear from you, so send us your feedback by posting on our new forum, or in the comment section here.

Here what’s new in version 3:

1. New layout options: Label alignment, multiple-choice alignment and field delimiters.
2. New text and image section, with image upload.
3. Brand new interface and several usability improvements.
4. New form features: calculation fields and page skipping logic.

If you are not familiar with our Form Builder, check out the tour.

1. Layout Options

Layout and themes can now be adjusted independently. You can choose between three main layout options: labels above, left aligned labels, and right aligned labels. You can also adjust this setting question by question if necessary. At this time, the Form Builder is designed with left-to-right languages in mind. If you are creating forms in a right-to-left language, such as Hebrew or Arabic, we’d like to hear from you.

For multiple-choice questions you can specify if you want the choices to be listed horizontally (on the same line), or vertically (one choice per line).

Which layout is best depends on the nature of your form. The Form Builder gives you the options and lets you decide. For some insight on label placement, I highly recommend reading this usability study by Matteo Penzo.

Another addition to the Form Builder is the field delimiters, available in the question’s Advanced panel. They allow you to add text to the left and right of each field. This is useful for instance to add separators, or to display the unit for a numeric field.

2. Text and Image Section

With the new rich text editor, it is now much easier to add formatted text and images to your form. You don’t need to know HTML and you don’t need to host your images on a separate website. You can upload images and write text directly from the Form Builder.

3. Other User Interface Improvements

• Changes are applied immediately, so there are no ‘Ok’ / ‘Cancel’ buttons anymore.
• You can collapse unneeded panels to preview changes in real time.
• You can reorder and quickly import a long list of choices in multiple-choice questions.
• You can add javascript and css in the form’s advanced properties panel.
• There’s a new interactive help for a quick overview of the Form Builder.
• The preview now correctly renders HTML code in Firefox.

4. New Form Features

Form Builder 3.0 introduces calculated fields and extended support for conditionals. You can now implement a page skipping logic in a multiple-page form. These two new features will be discussed further in our next post.

If you haven’t tried the new Form Builder, give it a try now, and let us know what you think!