When to Save, when to Submit on a Smart Form

In some cases you may come across a Smart Form on your project and are presented with two options at the bottom of the page:  SAVE or SUBMIT but are not sure which one to choose. 

The SAVE button just saves the data on the Form to the Latest Iteration. Use this to avoid losing data when moving away from the page or an update is pending.

When you you see the SUBMIT icon, when to use this function should depend on 2 things. 

•  Firstly, if a Workflow has been configured for the SmartForm by an Administrator, it will start the process of the Workflow. To know if a workflow has been configured, look at the bottom of the page for a group called "Workflow" and the workflow name in the middle.  

• Secondly, you will still see a SUBMIT button if there is no Workflow enabled because the person who built the SmartForm or the Administrator has switched on the option for “Intervals” on that particular SmartForm

If this is set to anything other than “Not Set”, the SUBMIT button will appear. Each time a user submits a form, it will save a new ‘iteration’, so they can always see what the value was on the form at the time of submission. 

Clicking on an old iteration will surface the information at the time of submission, but with the fields greyed out. The report builder also allows you to see earlier submissions and some other reports too. 

Note:  The "yearly," "monthly," "weekly" and "daily" options don’t follow a strict calendar schedule. Instead, they count the number of submissions allowed within a rolling 365-day period from the first submission. For example, "yearly" allows one submission per 365 days, "monthly" allows 12, "weekly" allows 52, and "daily" allows 365. So, if your first submission is in July and you submit 11 more that month under a "monthly" limit, you'd be blocked until one year after the first submission.