Temporary Object for Forms to hold data we may not want to associate

It’s possible, though unlikely, that there is a way to capture temporary data that is more pertinent to the filling out of a form, than the underlying contact or other entity filling it out. However, one of the things I’ve found frustrating when creating forms is the fact that I have to link every field to a property. It may be a hack, but sometimes you want some space that’s a different color to separate portions of a form. I don’t really want a blank field to be stored on a contact for formatting.

A more useful example is I want to know how someone wants to be contacted for a particular campaign or this time in particular. It may not necessarily be their preferred method of contact, but for this instance they may want to specify an exception. I don’t really need that information once that contact has been made, I really only need it that one time. There are cases where I want to make certain fields visible/invisible, required or not, or fill them in with something based on a user’s interaction. I may not be able to do all of those things in real time, but with a workflow, I would like to be able to decide if I want to store data from a particular field in one of several potential other fields or not. I may even want to modify it before storing it (or not).

There are plenty of other cases for having fields that I don’t have to store just in terms of not cluttering a database. I envision this temporary form being associated with the contact/company or other object for 90 days or some other term that could be determined through HubSpot tier/add-on and then being archived and finally deleted.

It seems that similar functionality exists for surveys, which is odd to me, because I would define a survey as a type of form. However, survey seems to have the opposite problem, I can mostly only save properties to the survey and not anything else. Why not a form that allows you to save to itself OR a contact or other associated object?

I feel the same! Here is my request as a product update.

  • Idea: add a form field option to either store separately or update/edit an existing property value instead of always updating a property value
  • Use case: allow forms to either append/store data or overwrite/update a field intentionally
  • Example: “For date properties, let admins choose whether a form should store the submitted date as a new value only connected to form submission, and preserving the original value, or update the existing date field.