Umbraco Forms 8.7 release

Overview:

• What’s new in Umbraco Forms 8.7
• Addition of Database Keys  
• reCaptcha v3
• New Slack workflow type
• Forms picker shortcuts
• CC/BCC for email workflows
• Edit prevalues
• Copy groups and fields

What’s new in Umbraco Forms 8.7

Umbraco Forms 8.7 contains many new features, improvements and bug fixes as well. Below you’ll find some highlights of the release but do see the release notes on the Forms download page for the full list of features and fixes.

Addition of Database Keys (migration on upgrade)

We’ll start out with the most important feature in the release; the addition of database keys. This provides an improvement to data integrity and performance, ensuring  that duplicate record data is avoided and allowing for more efficient database calls. 

It’s important to be aware of this addition as it is an update to the database schema adding primary keys, foreign keys, indexes and constraints. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Umbraco Forms, a migration will run to ensure all tables are updated with the new schema. This all happens automatically when you upgrade to Umbraco Forms 8.7.

If, for some reason, data already exists in an installation that violates these constraints, this will be logged and that particular schema update will be skipped. The upgrade WILL NOT try to automatically fix your forms data. Instead you’ll find a new health check, making it easy to identify those updates that could not be automatically applied. 

This allows you to fix any inconsistent or duplicate data - you can find more details and scripts to help address any errors in the new Database Integrity Health Check documentation.

New installations of Umbraco Forms 8.7+ will of course ship with this update and aside from improved performance´, in some scenarios, you should not see any change in functionality.

reCaptcha v3

reCaptcha is Google’s popular service that helps mitigate abusive traffic for your Forms. In Umbraco Forms 8.7 you’ll find a new field type that enables the latest version. reCAPTCHA v3 is less intrusive on website visitors and better at detecting suspicious behaviour. 

The new field type has been fully integrated, letting you configure the score threshold and add custom error messages to the field.

See the documentation for how to start using reCAPTCHA3 for Umbraco Forms and how to add public and private keys.

Note: The fieldtype for reCaptcha2 is still available and will continue to work if you are using that in your current installations. 

Umbraco Forms 7.5 has been released to include reCaptcha v3 for Forms 7.x as an upgrade. 

New Slack workflow type

A new workflow for posting to a Slack channel is now available. This uses webhooks as opposed to the deprecated token approach. The implementation is quite simple. All you need to do is to select the Slack workflow type and generate a webhook for your Slack app.

Screenshot of the configuration for the new Slack workflow type in Umbraco Forms 8.7

The “old” Slack workflow type has been preserved in order to ensure no existing workflows are broken. It has been renamed to Slack (Legacy).

Forms picker shortcuts

The Forms picker property editor has been updated with shortcuts to the Forms section for editing the selected form or opening the submissions for the form.

This will make it a little easier to configure, manage and maintain forms and entries, especially for sites with a lot of forms.

CC/BCC for email workflows

The email workflows (“Send email” and “Send email with template (Razor)”) have been updated to allow you to add CC and BCC recipients of submission data.

The workflows are used to send emails out when a form is submitted or approved. These extra options are handy if you want to send copies to multiple recipients.

Edit prevalues

Prevalues are the options added for Checkbox, Single/Multiple choice and dropdown field types. Previously you could add to the list but if you wanted to correct or update a prevalue you would have to delete it and add it again. A bit cumbersome 😬

With Umbraco 8.7 it is now possible to edit a prevalue in the field configuration making it easier to maintain and less prone to errors. 

Copy groups and fields

The final feature I’ll highlight is the addition of copy actions for both form groups and fields.

This feature allows you to duplicate a field or group within a form, making it faster to create fields and groups with similar settings.

And much more..

There are more features included in the release as well as a bunch of UI/UX improvements and bug fixes. See the release notes for more details.

What should I do when upgrading?

That depends! A migration will run when upgrading from an earlier version in order to update the database schema. It’s a good idea to go in to the Settings section and run the Forms Data Integrity health check after an upgrade to make sure everything is in order. If you have duplicate data you can find more details and scripts to help address any errors in the new Database Integrity Health Check documentation.

Do I need to upgrade?

We always encourage you to stay on top of the upgrades as you will benefit from all the new features and bug fixes. This release also ensures you will not run into issues with duplicate data - so an upgrade is highly recommended.

Get your hands on Forms 8.7

The latest version of Forms is available on Our.umbraco.com.  

On Umbraco Cloud, Forms 8.7 is available as a minor upgrade for all existing sites using Umbraco Forms 8.x.

All new sites on Umbraco Cloud will be running the latest version of Umbraco Forms.

You can also get Umbraco Forms 7.5 on the download page, NuGet and for Cloud projects running Umbraco 7.x.

Feedback

If you encounter any bugs or have a feature request, you’re welcome to raise an issue on the Umbraco Forms issue tracker. For more general product feedback you can always write to us on product@umbraco.com.