With the release of Gravity Forms v1.9 in October 2014, one of lovely new features was the option to allow your customers to start a form and come back later to finish it. Customers do not have to be logged in to take advantage of this feature. They are simply given a custom link they can use to retrieve the previously entered information. This link can either be copy & pasted from the Save screen or can be emailed to them and the form can be completed up to 30 days later. On the down side, the email can not be delayed to remind them to complete the form at a future time, and at this time, the length the form can be held before completion can not be changed to another time besides 30 days.
This feature is easy to activate. Choose the form where you want to activate this feature and go into Form Settings, and click the “Enable Save and Continue” box.
Once the box is checked, you will receive two warnings. The first that the link will be unencrypted, so you should use a secure connection (HTTPS) for the page where you will have the form. The second tells you that two new confirmations and one new notification are automatically generated. You can see that you will also be able to customize the “Save & Continue” link.
The first new confirmation created shows the user a link that they can copy and paste and save to complete the form later. If they prefer, they can enter an email and the link will be emailed to them. This is what the first confirmation will look like:
The second confirmation lets them know that email has been sent. The new notification, of course, is the email with the link that will be sent to whatever email is entered into the page.
There is no record of the partially completed forms, so partial entries cannot be edited by an admin unless they have the custom link. Entries are only listed in the back end once the completed form has been submitted.
And that’s all there is to it! Basically, you just have to check the box to enable the feature and everything is set up automatically. All confirmations and notifications can be customized, but that is optional.
As I mentioned before, there is no way to schedule the email to be sent later or to lengthen the 30 time period, but overall, it is a very nice new feature. Have you used this feature already? I would love to hear about it.
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