Understanding Keys

In Formium, we wanted to make it as easy as possible to re-use the same Workflow (like a thank you email) between multiple forms within a project. To make this happen, Formium stores each question's response by an administrative key and not by a globally unique reference identifier.

When you add a field to a form the Formium dashboard, Formium will attempt to generate this key for you once you're done typing the question. When you change a question key, new submissions with an answer to that question will use the new key, but old submissions will remain as they were with old key. When you create workflows, these keys are available for template variables under {{values.<key>}}.

A quick example

Imagine the following project

Form 1

• What is your name?
  • type: Short Answer
  • key: name
• What is your email address?
  • type: Email
  • key: email

Form 2

• Name
  • type: Short Answer
  • key: name
• Email
  • type: Email
  • key: email

Now, let's say you wanted to make a thank you email and use it between both forms. With Formium, you only need to make one Workfow. You can set the "To" field of the Email Workflow to {{values.email}} and Formium will correctly send the email to value of the email key in the submission. This will thus work on both forms. If you changed the type of question from "Email" to "Short Answer" but kept the key as email in one of the forms, Formium will still try to send an email with the value of the email key, even if it is an invalid email. Workflows aren't aware of field types, just the submission data at a given moment. It is thus up to you to ensure that your keys make sense and work. This is a very powerful, yet sharp knife. However, we believe in you! It saves oodles and oodles of time when you need to make a change across multiple forms and is 100000x better having to re-create the same workflow for each form.