Save progress whilst completing a long form

[guystern]

Hi all,

I’m a beginner and this is my 2nd Bubble project.

I am trying to create a long application form with many fields including text and quite a few file uploads.

We expect that our users will want to fill in some of the application and then save their progress, go away, search for documents and then come back and continue filling it in.

Can we do this with Bubble and have a save button that allows them to save their progress? How would one go about doing this?

Thank you,
Guy

[rod.danan]

Hey Guy. You will want to check the option for Auto-binding on inputs. That will save those fields in real-time without the user needing to click anything.

You can add a text item that says “application is automatically saved” so they know.

[firstfifteensoftware]

I think I know what you are trying to do, so maybe this will help.

I assume your users might be adding multiple entries. If so, you’ll obviously need a page to let them select which they want to work on. Or they can click your “new” button.

If “new”, you’ll probably want to automatically create an empty “Thing” which will eventually store all of the new data/files they will enter.

If they are selecting an existing Thing to work on, you can open your long form page, passing to it the unique ID of that Thing, and the page can depopulated with that Thing’s values.

As they fill out the form, you can either automatically save what they enter via Auto-binding or let them click a Save button. If they click Save, the page will update the current Thing with the values they entered. (Personally, I am not a fan of auto-binding. My users during testing always asked “where’s the save button”, so I stopped using it. Your experience may dictate otherwise).

If your long form has lots of distinct sections in it, you can get fancy and add a Save button to each section, so the user doesn’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom to save. Some users actually like this because it lets them complete one specific section of the form, save JUST that data, and get out.

You may also want to consider adding an alert at the top of the page to let them know the data was saved.

[guystern]

Thanks everyone! I’ll read up on auto binding.

Really appreciate it.

Cheers!