Now that you know how to create various types of forms, let us consider a very different scenario here. There are times when you have limited internet capacity or are facing frequent connectivity issues. You are in the middle of adding details to a form and face connectivity issues just at the moment you are planning to submit your information. This can be a very frustrating situation and can lead to the loss of relevant data. But there lies a solution to this problem too. You can create Offline forms, in other words, you can set up properties to allow the form data to be available when the user is offline.
Let us first have a look at the video to understand how you can build offline forms.
Offline form features
The No-code platform has certain features that enable you to create offline forms. There are a few important things to remember:
- These features are at the moment only for the Android and iOS devices
- The data has to be cached locally and would be submitted once the user comes online.
- You cannot enable offline submission through the Action flow. It is possible only with the Workflow.
When building such offline forms you have to make sure that when you are binding remote data, the caching of the data is very important. So you have to make sure that you enable the properties for caching. In another scenario, you would need the submission of data even when the user is offline. For this, you would have to make sure that you have enabled offline submission for your Workflow button.
Let us take an example to understand the features. Consider we have a product sheet that stores the product name and the image files as well as other supporting documents. Let us add a Dropdown control for the Product name . This will be bound to the product name column of the sheet. Now let us add the File upload controls for the uploading image files and supporting documents and a Workflow button.
Caching data
In the example, let us now select the Product name control and set the properties.
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Bind the Prod_name column to fetch data for the dropdown control using a LOOKUP formula.
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Under Info enable the Caching property. This will ensure that these values are fetched from the cache when the user is offline. It is important to note that the form is opened at least once when the user is online so that the data can be cached.
Enabling offline submission of form
For enabling offline submission, let us now set the properties for the Workflow button.
- Make sure that you have linked a workflow to the Workflow button.
- Enable Offline Submission under Properties . This will ensure that your data is cached for offline submission.
Now if you submit this form on your iOS or Android devices, you can see the offline data submission function properly. Note that if you are using the form when you are offline, your data including the uploaded files are cached. Only when you are online will those get updated to the sheet and can be viewed there eventually.
We can ensure that the data is not lost in case the user is offline and gets submitted whenever the user is Online. The Offline feature can be effectively used for the purpose.