Edit Form Responses

Table of contents

Overview

Assume you're organizing a workshop with multiple sessions and attendees fill out a registration form to indicate which session they plan to attend. A few days before the event, one of the attendees encounters a scheduling conflict and realizes that there is a need to change the session preference. With the ability to edit form responses, the attendee can revisit the form and switch the session selection.

Benefits of letting respondents edit their form responses

Respondents have the flexibility to make changes or corrections to their entries, accommodating unforeseen circumstances or changing preferences.
You can ensure that the information collected is as accurate and up-to-date as possible, leading to better planning and organization.
It reduces the need for manual intervention by organizers to handle individual change requests, saving time and effort.

How to allow respondents to make changes to their entries

There are two ways to do this:

Include a link to edit responses in the Thank You Page
Include a link to edit responses in the email notification triggered after form submission

Read more on each of these ways below.

You can also set an expiry for the response edit link.

Including edit link in Thank you Page

With this option, a quick link to edit a response will be shown in the Thank You Page immediately after a respondent submits an entry. To enable this option,

In your form builder, navigate to Settings > Submissions & Storage > Edit Response.
Select Yes to Allow Respondents to Edit Their Response.
Select Include a link in the Thank you page. A link to edit form response will now be provided in the Thank You page.
You can also choose to include a link to download the PDF of the edited response in the Thank You page by selecting the option to do so.

Set expiration for edit link

Once you enable the option to Allow Respondents to Edit Their Response, you can choose to set the duration for which the edit link should remain active.
To do this,

Select Set expiration for edit link.
You can choose to set the link expiration based on:

Fixed date & time
Date & time of submission

Fixed date & time

In End Date & Time, select the date and time for the edit link expiry.
In Message on link expiry, enter the message to be displayed to the respondents upon the expiration of the link.

Date & time of submission

In Expires after, provide the time span from the Date & time of submission. You can choose the unit of time span as Minutes, Hours, or Days from the dropdown.
In Message on link expiry, enter the message to be displayed to the respondents upon the expiration of the link.

Note:

1 Edit response links will remain active till the time specified in Set expiration for edit link, irrespective of any date and time-based restrictions configured in Form Availability settings.

2. If Set expiration for edit link is not configured, edit response links will remain active as per the date & time-based restrictions configured in Form Availability settings.

Including edit response link in email notifications

When you set up an email notification workflow to send confirmation emails to your respondents, you can include a link to edit their submitted responses in the email.

To enable this option,

In your form builder, navigate to Settings > Response Settings.
Select Yes to Allow Respondents to Edit Their Response.
Go to Email Notifications under Settings and compose the email. Learn more about Email Notifications.
Select Include a link to allow respondents to edit their response.

Alternatively, you can choose to include the edit response link inside the email notification anywhere within the email message
To do so,
1. While configuring your email notification template, click the icon in the Message section and select the Edit response option in the pop-up.
2. Enter the text to be displayed as a link in the email.

The email will now include a link for the respondents to edit their form response.

Note:
1. The option to include a link to allow respondents to edit their responses in the email notifications will be enabled only when you select Yes to Allow Respondents to Edit Their Response under Response Settings.
2. The form admin can view all Edit Response Links anytime by navigating to the All Entries section. Click on Additional Fields and enable the Edit Response URL column to display them. Learn More

Response Settings | Edit Form Responses - Zoho Forms