Sitecore

Screencast - How to Publish a Sitecore Form

Monday, December 28, 2020

Layer One - Product Owner - Felicity Osowski

Skipping steps in the Sitecore Form publishing process can leave you with a formless page and a confused expression. This quick overview video will help you ensure you've got the right flow every time.

Transcript

Hey there folks, this is Felicity with Layer One. I am here to talk to you today about publishing a Sitecore form. Before we get too far into it, just a couple notes for you. First of all, we are working on a demo test environment and our focus today is really on talking to you about the steps in publishing a Sitecore form. So we're really focusing on functionality, workflow, not so much the look and feel. Please note also along with that, that I do have a display zoom in place and a couple more important notes are that we are using Sitecore Forms rather than Web Forms for Marketers (WFFM). That's also within version 9.3. Last but not least, we do hope that you will reach out. Contact us if you have any follow up questions. You've got a few different ways to do that. You've got my email address felicity.osowski@layeronemedia.com. You've got our general informational email address, info@layeronemedia.com, and also our contact us form on our website, www.layeronemedia.com/contact-us. Alrighty, I am going to get us into our site today. What you're seeing right here is our demo instance and we are going to be putting a form on this support page right here, so that's sort of showing you there. To do that, we're going to go over into our main menu. We're going to be working in two different sections today. First of all, we're going to be in the Forms tool as well as the Content Editor. The Forms tool is really a WYSIWYG editor to let you move things around, get a sense of what the form is going to look like and what it's doing during that process is it's creating content that then does display within this content editor for further massaging, publishing, that sort of thing. We are going to start today with the Forms tool, and I'm going to create a new one. Alrighty just going to add a few basic fields. Text, email, I'll throw a submit action on there. Do some quick updating. OK now with the submit action what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a thank you page to navigate to after this. I already showed you the page that it's going to be placed on, that support page, but you do want to make sure that you have somewhere to send the person, after they are done filling out the form. So typically this would be, you know, a thank you page within the existing site. I'm just going to for the sake of simplicity, today I'm going to put this to direct to our website. Now I'm going to apply that, and last but not least, save my form. This is kind of that first step in the workflow of the publishing process. I do however, recommend that you save often so, you know do a few changes, save it, do a few more changes, save it, so that you're not losing any work there in case you decide to walk away. So I'm just going to call this demo test form 1. There we go, save that. Now our form is saved and what we're going to do is we're going to, as I mentioned, it generated content, so we need to do a couple of different things. First of all, we do need to go over to the page that it's going to be on and place it within that page, and then we also need to publish the form itself. Going over to the page where we're going to place it within the content editor. Here's that support page. I'm going to go over to the Presentation tab within the Details. And this is where I'm going to be placing that rendering. So I'm going to edit this default section here. Go over to controls and I'm going to choose to Add. Now, within your renderings, you're going to find it within this form section. It's the MVC form. So renderings again are those business rules for display. The logic that's going to show what the data looks like. So this is that rendering that controls that. Please note that if you are using an SXA site, you may also want to check out the MVC form renderer that provides some convenience functionality here. I'm going to put it within the main placeholder. And I'm also--it's kind of hard to see this--but I'm choosing to open the Presentation Details box immediately. So it's already copied over that we've got our main. Now we need to connect it up to the data source itself, which is that form within the content tree. So we're already sent over to that. And this is our demo test Form 1. I'm selecting that, I'm going to click OK. Then I'm going to click OK a few times. You want to make sure that it's in the correct place. This place is just fine. Alrighty, so now that we've got in our page, we're ready to publish, so I'm going to go over to my publishing tab. And choose to publish that item. We can simple now. Silly me, I went to the wrong section. I need to go over to the content tree where the form is and they need to publish that. So demo test form. Once again going to Publish. Publish item and be sure that your sub items are selected here. Publishing that. And now I'm ready to go over to our demo form here, refresh for you. And you'll see it shows up. Like I said, not pretty. It's a demo site. We're not not so interested in that, but I am just going to fill this out quickly and submit it. And that brings you to our site, where we encourage you to check us out further and contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.

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