Submission information lost after changing form

[mcjackson18]

Question

Craft version: Craft Pro 5.8.21
Formie version: 3.1.15

I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected behaviour. We're using Formie forms to ask users specific information that needs to be saved and referenced in the future. Up to now we've been using submissions to reference this information.

The issue we’ve encountered is that when forms are edited, data in existing submissions can sometimes be lost (or at least no longer displayed).

For example, if you have a form with a Checkboxes field containing options 1, 2, and 3, and a user selects option 3, this is saved and shown in the submission. However, if you later edit the form and remove option 3 from the Checkboxes field, that data is no longer visible in the submission.

I can see in the formie_submissions.content column in the database that "option 3" is saved but it's no longer visible on the submission.

Is this expected behaviour? Are we using submissions in the wrong way? Is it best to save a snapshot of the submission (field labels and data) elsewhere and then reference this instead?

Thanks

Additional context

No response

[engram-design]

It's expected in the same way that if you removed or modified custom fields on any element like an Entry, you'd likely encounter data loss. Indeed, you'll be able to see the content still in the database until the next time you save the submission, which after that the content would be gone.

So yep, if you want your content to be "long-lived" I would opt to either move the content out through an element integration, or decide not to mess with fields (archive current fields by setting Visibility = hidden/disabled).

We do have plans to address this on the cards, but that's a little while off.

[mcjackson18]

Understood, thanks @engram-design.

This would be a great feature 👍🏻