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Reading Responses

How to read what people submitted: everyone's answers to one form, one person's answers in full, and the files they attached.

Overview​

Chronicle answers two different questions about a form, and it has a screen for each.

What did everyone say? The Responses table on the Hub is one row per submission and one column per question, so you can scan a whole form's worth of answers, filter them, sort them, and export them.

What did this one person say? Clicking a row slides their whole submission in from the right, laid out question by question with their attachments underneath.

Both are available to anyone holding either Chronicle permission set. You do not need access to the objects the form writes to, or to the Form records themselves; you read them through Chronicle.

Responses: everyone's answers​

Open the Flourish Chronicle Hub tab, click a form's tile, and you land on Responses.

Every submission is a row. The first three columns are the submission itself, and then one column per question, in the order the questions appear on the form.

Column
FormThe submission's name. It stays on screen as you scroll sideways.
StatusNew, In Progress, Completed, or Archived.
CreatedWhen the submission was started.

Click a column header to sort by it. Click again to reverse.

Preview submissions from the builder are listed alongside real ones, marked (preview).

Filtering​

Everything in the filter bar narrows what is already on screen, so it responds as you type.

  • Search all answers matches anything in any answer, as well as the submission's name.
  • Status offers only the statuses actually present, so you cannot filter to nothing.
  • From and To bound the created date.
  • Hide unanswered questions drops every column that nobody in the current view answered. On a long form this is the fastest way to make the table readable, and it is worth reaching for before anything else.
  • Clear resets the lot.

How many submissions you are looking at​

The table loads the newest 200 submissions by default. Rows raises that, up to 2000.

The summary line under the filter bar tells you where you stand. When there are more submissions than the table loaded, it says so plainly: newest 200 of 1,203 - raise the row limit to see more.

This matters because the filters run over what has been loaded. Searching a form with 1,203 submissions while 200 are loaded searches those 200, not all of them. Raise the row limit when you need the whole picture.

Files​

A File Upload question gets a column of its own, named after the question. It says Uploaded when that person sent something and stays blank when they did not.

It tells you whether, never which. Files are stored under the respondent's own filename, so a submission with two upload questions shows you that both were answered without saying which file went with which. Open the submission to see the files themselves.

Signatures get no column. They are not something the respondent was asked to provide.

Export CSV​

Export CSV downloads exactly what is on screen: the current search, the current status and date filters, the current sort, and the columns you have not hidden. Hide a column and it is not in the file.

It also exports what has been loaded, not the whole table. If the row cap is holding submissions back, the message after the download says so rather than letting the file pass for the full set.

The file opens cleanly in Excel, including non-English answers.

One submission in full​

Click any row and that submission slides in from the right. The table behind it does not move, so you can read one and go straight to the next.

Escape closes the panel, as does clicking outside it.

You get the same view on a Form record's own page, on its Data tab.

The answers​

A plain Question and Answer table, in the form's own order, with page and section headings interleaved where the form had them. Search narrows it to matching questions or answers.

Questions nobody answered are hidden by default, since they are noise when you are reading a submission and essential when you are working out why one went wrong. The toggle shows them.

Answers read the way the form presented them: a picklist shows its label rather than its stored value, and labels are in the language the form was filled in.

Rows from a Related Records cell are flattened into the same table, one row per field, labelled with the row number, so a search reaches them too.

Attachments​

Files attached to the submission appear as tiles under the answers, each showing the file type, its name and its size, with Download and Open.

Signatures are not among them. A signature is on the Form's own Files list and renders into the completion PDF.

Actions​

Action
RefreshReload the submission.
Copy Form LinkCopies the link that reopens this submission, with the answers already in it. Appears once a Form Site is configured.
View RecordOpens the Form record. In the slide-over only.
DeleteDeletes the submission and its files. In the slide-over only, and only for people who can delete Form records.

Copy Form Link is not the form's public link. It reopens one person's submission. The form's own shareable link, which opens a new blank form, comes from Export & Publish in the builder. See Sharing forms.

Deleting is permanent, and it takes the submission's files with it. Nothing else in the org is touched: records the form wrote to are not affected.

When someone reports a problem with a form, all they usually have is the link they were sent. The Search forms box on the Hub landing takes it.

Paste the whole link, or just the key out of it. Chronicle works out which of the two kinds of key it is and tells you what it points at:

  • A form's key resolves to that form, and the button takes you to its Responses.
  • A submission's Public ID resolves to the one submission, and opens on it directly, even if it is older than the row cap would load.

A key that matches nothing says so. That is an answer, not an error: it usually means the key was rotated, and every link carrying the old one stopped working at that moment.