FormDragon user guide

FormDragon is a form builder with a phone app for collecting records, with or without a signal. You build forms on the web. People fill them in on a phone. Records sync to the server when a connection is available, and from there you can review them, export them, or send them on to other tools.

This guide covers how to do each of those things. It assumes you already have an account and an organisation.

Where to start

If you already have forms — in another tool, or designed in a spreadsheet — Bringing your existing forms explains how to have them built for you rather than rebuilding them.

Three terms, used precisely

These are easy to confuse early on, and the guide uses them consistently.

• A form is the set of questions. It has a status of its own: draft while you are building it, published once people can collect on it, archived when it is out of use.
• A record is one filled-in copy of a form. Its status is separate: draft, submitted, approved or rejected.
• Filling in a form and reading its records are different screens and different permissions. Somebody can be able to do one and not the other.

A form draft and a record draft are unrelated. An unpublished form nobody can use yet, and an unfinished record somebody means to come back to, both say “draft”. They share nothing else.

About the examples

Every example and screenshot comes from one invented organisation — a plant-hire company with an Assets register, Timecards, Home Inspections, Equipment Inspections and a five-field Site Visit form. None of it is a real customer’s form or data.

Three things that shape how the app behaves

• The phone holds a record until it syncs. A record saved on a device is real work, and the app says whether it has left the device yet. See Working offline.
• Forms are versioned. A record is filled in against the version that was current when it started, so changing a form does not rewrite existing answers. See Changing a form that is live.
• The field key is the durable name. Labels are for people; keys are what scripts, exports and integrations use. See Field keys.