Exporting/Importing Forms & Processes

Introduction

The ability to export and import forms and processes can be useful for many reasons, especially when transferring forms/processes between test and live sites. This allows you to avoid rebuilding a form or process in a different site. It can also be used to report any issues you may encounter to our Support Team by uploading the JSON export.  

Exporting a Process/Form

To export a process, go to the process designer, select Settings > Process Details > scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see the export/import options. When a process is exported, this means that all of the stages/forms will be exported also.

To export an individual form, go to the forms designer, select Settings > Form Details > scroll to the bottom of the page and you shall see the export/import options. 

Exporting and Importing onto the Same Site

Exporting a process with stage forms and importing to the same environment within which they already exist will mean that the forms are referenced, rather than duplicated. Therefore, changes made to a stage form in the original copy will affect the newly exported copy too and vice versa.

When importing a process within the original environment of its export the original category will also transfer to the new process. 

Exporting and Importing onto a Different Site

When importing a process onto another site, where the process already exists on that site, there a couple of approaches that can be taken:

• Create a new process on your second site and import the process here. This will leave the other process untouched and you will have two different processes. They cannot share exactly the same name though.

• Import the process into the existing process on your second site. This will completely overwrite it with the new version.

When exporting from one site to another where the original category does not exist, the category will not be transferred over. It will need to be manually added.

Although a process is expected to work in the same manner when exported into another site, it should always be tested before going live to customers.

When exporting a process from one form to another, the permission groups that the process is assigned to will not be carried over. You will have to recreate the permission groups manually and assign the process to these new groups.

Exporting Forms with Language translations

Where a form has a language section (Settings/languages) it is necessary to remove the language section and any string that contains AF-Lang-<guid> before exporting teh json to use to create another form.

eg

1. Take translated form 1
2. Export json
3. Import to holding form
4. Remove the language section and any string that contains AF-Lang-<guid>
5. export json from holding form
6. Import json to new form (language section will be empty and will need to be recreated)

Note:

• Integrations are not exported when a process is exported. They have to be exported separately. 
• It is not possible to bulk import/export processes.
• Changes made to subforms are not carried over when a process is exported and imported from one site to another. You will have to manually make any changes to subforms again after you have imported the process. 

• If a process is imported and it contains forms which have the same name as existing forms on the site, then the current date and time will be added to the duplicate form. This is easily amended by deleting the old versions of the forms and updating the names of the new forms.

• There is a 10mb import limit. This is set because processes should not have a reason to exceed this limit. If your process exceeds this 10mb limit, it may be an indication of issues within your process that are taking up space. 

• The 'Enable New Queue Processor' tick box may not still be ticked when imported over to a different environment

• If permission Usergroups are hardcoded then these will not work when moving between environments - when configuring these integrations it is better to use token values from either the form or environment tokens, rather than hardcoding the usergroup IDs.