Form Test Mode
Until now, testing a form meant your practice entries landed in the same place as the real ones. You either avoided testing on a form people actually use, or you filled it in and then went hunting…
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WHAT THIS IS FOR
Until now, testing a form meant your practice entries landed in the same place as the real ones. You either avoided testing on a form people actually use, or you filled it in and then went hunting for the rows to delete afterwards.
Test Mode lets you put a form into a testing state, fill it in as often as you like, check the results came out right, and know that none of it reaches your live dashboards. When you are done, you switch it back.
TURNING IT ON
Open the form in the form builder, open the Settings panel, and find Testing Mode (submissions saved as test data). Set it to YES.
You will find it in the lower half of the Settings list, just under Show FieldGroup Validation Toast and above the Dashboard View Navigator section.
The Settings button stays greyed out until the form has at least one field on it. If you cannot click Settings, add a field to the form first.
The switch appears on forms only. It is deliberately hidden in the dashboard builder, because a dashboard has nothing to put into test mode.
WHAT THE PERSON FILLING IN THE FORM SEES
A yellow banner across the top of the form: TESTING MODE - responses submitted on this form are saved as test data and will not appear in live dashboards.
It is meant to be impossible to miss. Nobody should fill in a form believing it counts when it does not. Set the form back to Live and the banner is simply not there.
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE DATA
Every submission is marked test or live at the moment it is submitted. The mark is decided by reading the form's own setting on the server, not by anything the browser sends - so it cannot be faked, and it cannot be changed by the person filling in the form.
Test responses are stored, not thrown away. They are still there to look at afterwards.
WHERE TEST DATA GOES, AND DOES NOT GO
By default a dashboard shows live responses only. This covers the numbers as well as the rows - totals, record counts and paging all ignore test responses. A test fill cannot quietly inflate a count or a chart.
LOOKING AT YOUR TEST DATA
Click the flask icon in the top right of the dashboard. It switches to showing only the test responses, with an orange TEST DATA VIEW badge so you cannot forget which view you are in. Click it again to go back to live.
It is per person - turning it on changes what you see, not what anyone else sees. And it is per dashboard - switching it on for one does not put every other dashboard into test mode.
WHO IS ALLOWED TO SEE TEST DATA
Only people who are members of the SD that the dashboard belongs to. Anyone opening the dashboard through a shared link always sees live data, and never gets the flask icon at all.
SWITCHING BACK TO LIVE
Turn the Testing Mode switch off. New submissions are stamped live from that moment on. Existing test responses stay test responses - they do not convert, so if you want them gone they have to be deleted. There is no waiting period; the next time the dashboard fetches, it reflects the change.
LIMITS WORTH KNOWING
Test fills still create real tasks. The filtering covers form-response dashboards. If you have a widget that counts SDs or tickets created, test fills will still be counted there. That was a deliberate scope decision, not an oversight.
Anything submitted before this feature existed counts as live. There was no mark on those rows, so they are treated as real data.
The test view shows test data only - not test and live side by side.
Check yourself
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