New Droplet Features

We are always working on something new. Here is where you'll learn all about any new features released in the past month and be able to look back at our historical updates. Please let us know if you have any questions about any updates you see here. 

July 2023

In the past month, we’ve made some updates to the Droplet application aimed at strengthening Droplet’s security features. This is part of our ongoing efforts to make sure that our level of security continues to grow with the application. One of these updates was a change to the way the application ensures that a user is who they say they are and the other is a change to the way we allow our forms to call out to other sites on the internet. These updates should have no impact on your current forms.

June 2023

Introducing Workflow Flexibility: This month, we’ve increased the flexibility of workflows by eliminating the rigid sequence of workflow steps and the step assignments requirement.

Freedom in Workflow Sequence: You can now add ‘Rejected’ and ‘Completed’ steps anywhere in the workflow - even midstream! This means, even after a form reaches the ‘Completed’ step, it can be reopened and directed through an alternative workflow, increasing your form’s adaptability.

Optional Step Assignments: No longer are you required to assign every step of a workflow. While it’s still useful to assign steps when you want submissions to move forward promptly, this change gives you the freedom to assign steps later. Now, you can leave a workflow step unassigned until it’s time for the submission to be processed, cutting out the need for placeholder assignments.

May 2023

You can now create exclusive roles, rather than just inclusive roles. So if you’re using tags on your forms, submissions, accounts or datasets you can now opt certain items out of a user's views. 

For example, you could make it so that those with a role related to the finance department would be able to see all submissions with the exception of submissions tagged as HR department. You could also make it so that users with roles related to the HR department can edit all datasets with the exceptions of ones tagged as from the finance department.

April 2023

Now, not to pick favorites, but two of our biggest and coolest releases of recent times came out in the last month. The first one is our new Dataset Editor. 

The data that feed our forms and workflows can change over time. These might be things like new approvers, or budget codes, or even cafeteria menu options. Previously these items were hard-coded into your projects and required reaching out to our support team to have them changed. We can now break out values from your forms and allow for you to change them by designated individuals responsible for maintaining data items in your Droplet instance. These data managers can create new versions of your existing datasets either by editing them in a text editor, or they can edit them in the brand new visual editor. Once these changes are ready to be published a simple click from your data admin will automatically update the data in any form that is linked to your datasets.

The second major release this last month is something you might not notice right away, but we’ve gone through and done a massive overhaul of how everything behind the scenes works. The end result is that your forms now work way, way, way faster. This will be especially evident when you load large forms, or forms with lots of complexity and calculations. Not only will they load faster but filling out the forms will be way faster too. Any delay in items popping up, or hiding, or calculations happening should now be negligible.  

So those were the big ones, but we had a handful of other really great features last month:

🏷️ You can now search for forms by tag when you’re creating a packet, so if you’ve tagged your forms for use in a packet, assembling a packet from them should be a breeze.

➕ Our search has improved in all areas, so you can now include multiple search terms when searching for forms, accounts or submissions and search will attempt to match all of them. 

🧐 Searching will now take into account tags, so if an item has a tag that matches a search term it will now show up in the search results.

🚫 Roles can now contain exclusive permissions, so instead of saying that a role can access certain forms/datasets/packets, you can now create roles that can access all items except specific forms/datasets/packets.

March 2023

First, you’ll notice that submissions now show which version a submission was made against when viewed on the All Submissions page. In the past, if enhancements were made to a form, your old submissions would lack those enhancements, and it was tough to know which submissions had these new enhancements implemented. Now you can easily tell a submission’s form version. You can even filter by form version when you choose to filter your submissions by a particular form.

You’ll see this form version in a submission’s activity log so there’s no need to switch between different views to confirm.

With this, we have also added functionality to allow our support team to migrate submissions from one version to another.

Moving on to the Forms page, you can now filter your forms by their status. This helps you quickly find out which forms are Enabled, Disabled, or Not Published.

Lastly, if you’re using our API to supply data to us for a specific form, we’ve implemented Global Data Sets so that you can actually reuse that data for multiple different forms without having to make as many calls to our API. 

February 2023

The first feature allows you to prevent individuals without Droplet accounts from seeing your forms. Previously anyone with the link to your form could access and fill out a form, but now by enabling this option, you can ensure that only individuals who can currently log on to the system are able to access your forms or submit them.

The second feature requires the aforementioned feature to be enabled. It takes the login information provided by the user and pre-populates the form with that information. This way, your users don’t have to retype their name and email address, but you can also ensure that the user filling out the form is who they say they are.