Changing a form that is live

A published form can be edited. Existing records are not rewritten: each was filled in against the version current at the time, and stays that way. What needs care is changing a field that already holds answers.

Adding, reordering and relabelling

All safe. A new field is simply empty on older records. Reordering changes nothing stored. Renaming a label changes only what people read.

Changing a field’s type

Allowed, and most changes lose nothing — a number read as text is the same number. Going the other way, or into a type that cannot hold the shape, is where answers are at risk.

Two things are shown before you commit, and they are not the same thing:

• The warning says what that pair of types can do in principle.
• The count says what would happen to your actual records.

Where they disagree, believe the count. A text field that happens to hold nothing but digits converts perfectly however alarming the pairing sounds.

Values that cannot be converted are emptied, and you are told how many and in which field before anything happens. Every record is converted, approved ones included.

Renaming a field key

A key follows the label automatically while a field is new, and stops once the form has been saved. Renaming it afterwards moves every stored answer from the old key to the new one and re-links any subform entries pointing at it.

What it does not do is rewrite the places that mention the key — scripts, formulas, display columns and document templates. Those are listed for you to update deliberately. See Field keys.

What is genuinely irreversible

• Deleting a field removes its answers from every record. There is no bin for a field.
• Emptied values from a type conversion are gone once applied.

Export the form’s records before either, if the data matters. Both are fast to do and impossible to undo. See Export.