Overview:
- What’s new in Umbraco Forms 10.2?
- AJAX/Headless Form Rendering and Submission
- Data Retention Settings
- Field and Workflow Settings Customization
- "Magic string" Formatting
- And much more…
- How to get your hands on the Umbraco Forms
What’s new in Umbraco Forms 10.2?
While the main feature of Umbraco Forms 10.2 is arguably the new headless API, there is a long list of features, improvements, and fixes that help make Forms an even better companion for your Umbraco project. Let’s take a look at what’s new in this release:
AJAX/Headless Form Rendering and Submission
An entirely new API layer now ships with Umbraco Forms allowing you to render and handle form submissions more easily in single-page applications or a headless architecture. This is an additional option and does not affect the conventional way of integrating forms in Umbraco templates. It provides an out-of-box solution to use Umbraco Forms in a wider variety of projects, much easier than in the past.
Swagger provides a helpful UI to easily review the API definition
We've looked to align the API with similar plans for development within Umbraco Heartcore and Umbraco CMS, so any use of Umbraco APIs are as consistent as possible. We also plan to ensure the API is precisely aligned with the upcoming version 3 of the Umbraco Heartcore REST API, by adhering to the same schema, thus allowing even more familiarity when working across projects with either a traditional or headless Umbraco setup.
To start using the new API please refer to the Headless/AJAX Forms documentation.
Data Retention Settings
Adding periodic clean-up of submission data. Oftentimes it's not necessary to keep form entries forever, and so with this release we now allow you to configure rules for the automated deletion of this data. This can help keep projects collecting many submissions lean and help ensure compliance with data privacy policies
As this new feature adds the ability to automatically delete data it is opt-in, meaning you have to configure and enable it where you use Umbraco Forms.
Once enabled you to get new options to configure the data retention period for submitted and approved records separately. You will be able to provide a number of days to keep both submitted and approved entries for, on a per-form basis:
Further customization is available via configuration allowing you to set defaults for all new forms as well as how often the background task for deleting records should run.
You can find more details on how to enable and set defaults in the configuration documentation.
Field and Workflow Settings Customization
It is now possible to configure which form settings can be edited from the backoffice. There are cases where you want to restrict access to a certain field or workflow settings, such as email addresses or reCaptcha scores.
The new customization options are highly configurable. Not only can you hide certain settings in the UI, but it is also possible to set them as read-only so editors can still see the configured value.
This is an opt-in feature, so all settings will continue to work as previously when upgrading to Umbraco 10.2. Please refer to the Settings Customisation section in the Configuration documentation.
Magic String formatting
Umbraco Forms has a useful feature for replacing placeholder strings dynamically with values derived from different sources. These are known as "magic strings". It is now possible to customize the formatting of Magic Strings, to allow for extended use cases and enhance the capabilities for creating interactive forms.
See the Formatting Magic Strings documentation for more details on how to use this.
You can even create your own “formatters” to cater to specific use cases. More on this in the Adding a Magic String Format Function documentation.
And much more…
There are more features and fixes included in the release such as improved support for labels in the Block List editor.
There are also new options for configuring where prevalue sources are stored which can be helpful for load-balanced sites and deployments room source control.
The full list of features, improvements, and fixes can be found in the Umbraco Forms release notes. Note that there we’ve added a couple of additional changes since the release candidate:
- Resolved issue with removed field type preventing edit of form #899
- Added functionality to replace magic strings within the rich text field content #903
How to get your hands on the new Umbraco Forms release
Umbraco Forms comes preinstalled on all Umbraco Cloud projects and as of today all new projects will be running the latest version of Forms. For all existing Umbraco Cloud projects, all the new features and fixes are just 2 minutes away with the upgrade minor version feature.
We’ve wrapped it all up for you, so all you have to do now is follow these steps:
- Add a Development Environment to your project, if you do not already have one (Add a Development environment by clicking “Manage Environments” in the project view)
- Make sure you also restore the content to the Development Environment from your Live.
- When the Development Environment is all set up and you’ve made sure you don’t have any pending changes on the Development Environment - you are now ready to upgrade to the latest version of Umbraco Forms!
- It's as easy as clicking a button, literally. The "Upgrade Available" button on the Development Environment will start the auto-upgrader and we’ll take care of everything from here! 🚀
- Once it's done, check the Development Environment to make sure everything is looking right.
- When that's confirmed, you are ready to deploy the upgrade to the next environment - Live or Staging - and take full advantage of all the new features.
And remember, you can always spin up a new project on Umbraco Cloud to try the latest versions of Umbraco CMS, Forms, and Deploy, either from your existing Umbraco Cloud account or by taking a free Umbraco Cloud trial.
Installation and release notes:
Installation and release notes can be found on the Umbraco Forms package page on Our.umbraco.com.
Thanks to everyone testing out the release candidates 🙏 All issues reported have been addressed and listed in the release notes. For general feedback, you’re always welcome to contact us at product@umbraco.com and specific issues on the Umbraco Forms GitHub issue tracker.