Webform

By default, submissions are logged in your GW Drupal website, however, you can create email notifications that get sent out whenever a submission is logged. At a minimum, we recommend setting up two email notifications:

• A confirmation to the form submitter
• A notification to the GW staff member responsible for following up

Configuring Webform Email Notifications

1. Indicate what email address will be notified
   • Use the Custom field to enter a fixed email address(es) in the text field, which works best for sending a notification to the GW staff member(s) who should be aware of and/or follow up on the submission.
     • Separate multiple email addresses with a comma and no spaces. Ex: [email protected],[email protected]
   • Use the Component field to dynamically look for an email address entered on your form. This works best for sending confirmation emails to form submitters.
      
2. Set up the email header
   • Each section of the header can be set up with fixed, customized or dynamic information:
     • Default: will pull information from your GW Drupal website and will typically be impersonal and somewhat vague in description
     • Custom: slightly more personalized, this allows the form creator to enter custom information and to also take advantage of form field tokens
     • Component: most personalized, this dynamically pulls information that has been entered into the form

For the internal email notification, we recommend:

• A custom Email Subject line
• A dynamic Email From Address, using the Component option to pull the form submitter's email address from the form
• A dynamic Email From Name, using the Component option to pull the form submitter's name from the form

For the form submitter's email confirmation, we recommend:

• A custom Email Subject line; ex: "Confirmation: Your submission to [name of form] has been received"
• A custom Email From Address, using an organizational GW email address, if possible
• A custom Email From Name, using your organization's name
   

3. Configure the Email Template
   • This is the information that will be sent in the email. By default, it uses tokens to dynamically pull information from the form submission into the email.

Tokens

Tokens are used to dynamically populate information with the unique responses from form submitters. A table of all available tokens is visible within the collapsed Tokens section beneath the Email Template.

Tokens require the use of the token key - which is fixed by the system - and the form field key - which is created when the form fields are created - in order to work.

Confirmation Page

Webform pages offer several options for confirmation messages, including a bare-bones default confirmation page. However, we recommend creating a General Content page to redirect to as the confirmation page, as the default page does not include the Brand and Hero on the page.

If no custom confirmation page has been created, the default confirmation page will load upon form submission, thanking the user for completing the form and linking back to the form.

Form Status

Webform pages are managed in two parts:

• the page elements (title and body text)
• the form fields

The benefit of this infrastructure is that it's possible to hide the form fields without unpublishing the page altogether. For instance, if a form is temporary or seasonal, the fields can be hidden when submissions are not being accepted. If and when submissions are being accepted again, the form fields can be made public again.

Managing forms in this way prevents websites from website visitors with the form link from encountering a 404 Page Not Found error message from trying to access webform pages that have been deleted or unpublished when submissions are no longer being accepted.

To set the form status to open or close, simply toggle the status option as necessary.

Validation rules allow you to set additional restrictions or requirements on specific form fields. For instance, while the Email form field automatically validates for proper email formatting, content owners can add an additional validation rule to restrict the field to @gwu.edu email addresses.

There are quite a few validation rules, but most only work on a handful of form field types. For instance, the Numeric values rule, which "verifies that user-entered values are numeric, with the option to specify min and/or max values" only works on the hidden, number, and text field form fields. It will not work on any other form field type.

Viewing Results

The Results tab displays all of the form submissions to date in several formats:

• The Submissions view is the default view and, admittedly, is not very useful as it displays the system information for each logged result.
• The Analysis view displays each question/form field, the number of times a response was submitted and the average for all responses.
• The Table view displays each submitter's response to each question/form field in a table format.

Exporting Results

Webform results can be exported into a CSV or Microsoft Excel file from the Download section. The export can be customized to only export specific fields and within specific date ranges.

For instance, if you have previously exported the results, you can choose to only export the newest submissions. Or, if you only need certain information from the form, you can choose to only download the responses to that/those form field(s).

Clearing Results

Finally, the Clear button provides the option to delete all results. You will be prompted to confirm that you want to delete all results, and if you affirm that decision, it cannot be reverted. So delete with caution.

Also, please note that you cannot use this option to delete specific results or a portion of the results. All results will be deleted. Individual results can be deleted from the Submissions button or by viewing individual responses and clicking the delete button therein.