How to Add Field Variables to Confirmation & Notification E-Mails
The default notification e-mail is great, as it includes the submitted data for all form fields, but sometimes you might not want to e-mail all of that info to everyone. Say you send out two notification e-mails for your order form. One goes to sales so that they can log contact details of the submitter and contact them in the future. The other e-mail goes to receiving and needs to contain more details about the order than what sales needs. You can create two different custom e-mails, one containing just the submitted contact details that goes to sales and the second that contains the contact and order info that goes to receiving.
Another common situation that requires a custom e-mail is when you are collecting sensitive information on your form, such as credit card numbers. Unless you are using PGP, you shouldn’t be e-mailing credit card numbers to yourself, since e-mail is not a secure method of transmitting sensitive data. Instead, you can either send a link to your data in your notification e-mail, or you can build a custom notification e-mail that includes all fields except for the credit card field.
So how do you include form field data in a notification or confirmation e-mail? It’s really quite simple. Inside of a notification e-mail, click the radio button for “custom message” or simply create a confirmation e-mail, as confirmation e-mails are custom by default. Next, you will want to scroll down to where it says “Insert Fields” and you will find a list of all the fields on your form. Click on one of those links to insert the data from that field into your e-mail.
Say we have an order form and are collecting name, address, quantity, item, and cost. We could draft a confirmation e-mail to the user that says something like:
Dear <Name>,
Thank you for ordering <Quantity> of our <Item> for a total cost of <Total>.
To do this, click on the name of the field you want to insert when creating your e-mail, and the field ID number for that field will be inserted into your e-mail. This will look something like this:
Dear {$6423110},
Thank you for ordering {$6423115} of our {$6423114} for a total cost of {$6423116}.
Those field ID numbers will be replaced when the e-mail is sent out by Formstack with the actual info the user submits to your form, so the final result will look like this:
Dear John,
Thank you for ordering 5 of our t-shirts for a total cost of $100.
This is just one short example, as the possibilities for creating custom notification and confirmation e-mails are endless.
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Is the only way to get the “Field Variable Number” for a given field in a form to create a notification email and derive it from there ? That seems silly.
The field variable number, as I understand it, is a unique # assigned to a field upon its creation. You should have this number somewhere easily viewable from the Build interface when I click on a given field. It is a critical piece of information for all kinds of reasons.
What are you wanting to use these variables for? The only place they can be used is in confirmation/notification e-mails and submit actions, and they can be viewed in these places.
We recently (in the last week) added the ability to add them to one other place, in the note sections of some or our third-party integrations. We are in the process of updating the note sections for these integrations with links you can click on to insert these field IDs.
It would be awesome if formspring integrated with Google Documents so that field variables could be placed in a doc template to generate a custom letter, etc.