Often, your automated workflows will need input or oversight from a human. That could be somebody on your immediate team, an authenticated colleague from your wider company, or even an anonymous user on the public Internet. Whoever they are, you can give them a user-friendly way to provide input with forms in Tines.
Adding a form
Drag a form onto the diagram from the ‘Tools’ menu. Then, connect it to a downstream Action, to receive submissions.
Specifiying form fields
Add fields to your form to accept different kinds of input from your users. We support a variety of fields, including short text, long text, numbers, dates, options, file uploads, and more.
The field editor offers detailed per-field control, like marking fields as required or adding contextual descriptions.
The end-user experience
Use the ‘↗’ button on the top right of any form to open it a new tab. This is the URL you can share with end-users for filling out the form.
The form is presented as a standalone page, with user-friendly inputs:
Controlling end-user access
By default, forms are restricted to those currently signed into the Tines tenant.
We support more open-ended access controls, where required:
Public: allow unauthenticated users to view and submit forms, if they have knowledge of the URL.
Require SSO: allow anyone in your organization, authenticated with SSO, to view and submit forms. Useful for company-wide scenarios.
You can customize the form's access by selecting it and scrolling to the bottom of the configuration sidebar.
Prepopulating fields
You can use a URL query string to provide pre-filled values for form fields. Query parameters use a ‘snake case’ version of the field’s name.
For example, if you wanted to prepopulate the ‘First name’ text field with the value ‘Jane’, and the ‘Count’ number field with the value ‘1’, you could use a URL like https://your-tenant.tines.com/forms/6c93251d5b31bc?first_name=Jane&count=1.
Multi-stage forms
You can chain multiple forms together across your Story, for more deeply interactive input workflows. For example, you could switch between two options for a second step of input, based on the first input provided:
To use multi-stage forms, simply connect one form to another, with Actions in between as required. Users will be seamlessly transitioned from one screen to the next, once ready.
You can connect as many forms together as you like – we support even the most complex looping and branching structures.
Controlling transitions
For advanced control, you can customize the ‘submission mode’ of each form in the right-hand-side configuration sidebar.
Choose from:
story_run– the default, seamlessly transition to the next form once readysuccess_page– immediately bring the user to a success page after submission, disabling transition to subsequent formsredirect– transition to a custom URL immediately after submission
On-demand form URLs
You can also use forms to receive user input midway through a Story run – not just to kick one off. In these cases, you’ll need to send a message to the user containing a URL that lets them provide input to the in-flight story run.
To achieve this, you can use the FORM.form_name variable in Formulas expressions. This will produce a link to the form, ready for sharing, in the context of the current story run.
For example, you could add the form downstream of an Send Email Action, and include a link to the form in the email. Once the user clicks on the link and submits the form, the workflow will continue as usual:
