Save to Submissions Action – WS Form

Save Submission

Note: WS Form will never save passwords. Such fields are only used by the User Management add-on for the purpose of setting or resetting a password and will never appear in the submissions data.

This action is added by default when you create a form, and it is used to save a submitted or saved form to the WS Form database for later retrieval in the Submissions administration page.

When a form is saved or submitted, the following is stored in the database:

  • Submission ID
  • Status
    • Submitted, Draft, or Trashed
    • Whether the form was submitted in preview or published mode
  • Date added
  • Date updated
  • WordPress user (if submitted by a website visitor who is logged in)
  • Duration (the time it took the website visitor to complete the submission)
  • All submitted fields
  • Any tracking information that was enabled and able to be obtained
  • Details of any actions that fired when the form was saved or submitted

Adding This Action

To add a ‘Save to Submissions’ action:

  1. When editing your form, click the ‘Actions’ icon at the top of the page. The ‘Actions’ sidebar will open on the right-hand side of the page.
  2. Click the ‘Add’  icon to add a new action.
  3. Select ‘Save to Submissions’ from the Action pulldown. A series of settings will appear.

As with all sidebars in WS Form, click the ‘Save’ button at the bottom to save your changes, or click ‘Cancel’ to disregard your changes.

The ‘Save to Submissions’ action settings are as follows:

When Should This Action Run?

You can choose to show the message when the form is saved, submitted, or both.

Fields to Save

This setting allows you to save all fields or select which fields to include or exclude. If you choose the include or exclude filter feature, you will be prompted to add the fields you wish to filter. Click ‘Add’ to add fields to this list.

Clear Hidden Fields

When this setting is checked, WS Form will clear the value of any fields that are hidden on the form before they are processed by this action. This is useful if you only want to include completed fields a user could see at the time the form was submitted or saved. Note that fields that are of the hidden type are always included.

Auto Expire Submissions

You can set submissions to automatically expire after a pre-determined number of days using this option. Expired submissions are moved to a status of ‘Trash’.

If forms are not expiring, please ensure your wp-cron process is correctly configured to run.