What is a form submission

The term form submission is the industry standard term used to describe the form data or values collected from form inputs when a form is submitted. A form submission is not a form notification, a form notification is an outgoing email that occurs after a form submission takes place and often includes the form's data.

When a webform is submitted, the web browser's JavaScript engine can automatically create what in programming is called a FormData object. The FormData Object contains all the values that are submitted with the form. After the FormData object has been created, the input values and field labels are extracted and re-formatted into a readable form submission. The form submission can then either be sent in the form of a notification or saved to a database for review later.

When reviewing form submissions, the field label associated with the input field is traditionally appended or positioned directly over the input value being displayed. For example, if an email address is included with the form submission, the field label “What is your email address?”, will be displayed directly over the entered email address when reviewing the submission. This is so that the form data does not display only values; instead, it makes the submission readable.

A form submission takes place when the user enters all the required fields of a form and clicks the form's submit button or triggers the forms submit event. Before the form submission can be deemed valid, the FormData object is sent to the server for processing and undergoes a security process called server-side validation. Before the submission can be accepted as valid and not rejected as spam or for being malicious, security protocols, e.g., server-side validation, perform multi-layered validation processes until a pass or fail occurs. If successfully validated, the form submission can then be sent to the administrator of a website, a webmaster, and saved to the database.

Depending on whether an online form builder or a WordPress form builder is being used to create forms, oftentimes a submissions inbox will be available that contains and displays the submissions for a website's forms. The submissions tab, link, and/or modal will generally include an overview of each of the collected submissions as well as an expandable or dedicated page to view all the submitted values. However, a submissions tab is not always possible if the form submissions are not programmed to be saved directly on a server or through a cloud storage provider. If the submissions are not saved, the only way to view a submission is through a notification or outgoing email.

In general, all data submitted in a form will be contained in the FormData object, except images or media files such as .png files, PDF’s, and text documents, etc. Files must be uploaded to a server first in order to be displayed in a submission. While FormData objects contain virtually all values submitted within a form, a File Object for items uploaded with a file upload or multi-file upload field is required for capturing different types of values, such as images. Once the file(s) have been uploaded to a server, the file URLs can be generated and made viewable in a submission by either a link or attaching the image directly by using an image tag.

In general, a form submission is all the data submitted by a user through input fields contained inside a form. Form submissions can be viewed in a form notification, which is either saved on a server and made to be viewable with programming or through an email in the form of a notification.