The Online Forms App in the App Store can be used to update or enroll students in your QuickSchools account. This is done by mapping fields from your Online Forms into fields in QuickSchools. But every so often, you may want to update the fields on the Online Forms. How does this affect the process of updating/enrolling students from the Online Forms App?

If you’re using our standard Custom Fields to create your forms, then you simply need to update the existing custom fields, and the mapping info will be retained. And new custom fields can easily be mapped as well. But if you’re using PDFs, the process can be a little more involved.

The Online Forms app will pick up fields from your fillable PDF in order to be mapped to fields in QuickSchools.

Best Practice: When creating fillable fields for your PDF, be sure to use human-readable IDs for the fields. QuickSchools will use/display these fields as part of the mapping process. More info here: https://blog.quickschools.com/2018/11/07/fillable-pdfs-for-online-forms-app/

The important thing to note here is that QuickSchools uses the Field IDs from the PDF in order to map to fields in QuickSchools. If you change the Field IDs in the PDF and re-upload the PDF to QuickSchools, the system will regard those fields as NEW fields.

So in order to retain any existing mapping info within the Form Packet that you’ve already configured, it’s important to reuse the IDs for the fillable fields that have already been mapped. And if you don’t have a copy of the PDF already, you can easily download a copy of the PDF file from the Form Packet. Just open the Form Packet to view the list of forms attached to the packet, and click on the “Preview” button:

You can easily download the PDF File from the Preview screen.

Best Practice: When updating PDFs for the Online Forms, be sure to REUSE the Fields IDs from the Fillable PDF, in order to retain the mappings for previously uploaded PDFs.

As an example, let’s say you have an Online Registration Form that contains a date field you want to update. And you also want to add a new Comments field too. You can download the existing PDF file, update the Date field, add a new Comments field, and then re-upload the form back to the Form Packet. Assuming you did not change the Field ID for the Date field, the existing mapping will remain intact. You would then simply map the new Comments fields if needed. Be sure to also check out this article about cross browser compatibility for PDF files.

If you need assistance updating your PDF file, you can request assistance from our support staff. We charge an hourly rate for making these changes for you. There are also a lot of free online resources available to update Fillable PDFs, if you’d like to do it yourself.