Core concepts
The vocabulary
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Organization | A workspace. Forms, responses, records and dropdown lists all belong to exactly one, and nothing is visible across them. |
| Team | A named group of people inside an organization. Forms and apps assigned to a team are visible only to its members. |
| Project | A folder inside a team, such as Training Module. It groups a team's forms and apps; access still comes from the team. |
| Form | One questionnaire, with its own questions, settings, theme and public link. |
| Version | An immutable snapshot of a form taken at publish. Respondents fill a version; responses are bound to the one they saw. |
| Response | One completed submission of one version of one form. |
| Question | A single field. Has a type, a label, validation, and a stable id that answers are keyed by. |
| Dropdown list | A managed set of dropdown options — states, districts, schools — reusable across every form. |
| Record type | The kind of thing an app collects about: a school, a patient, a household. |
| Record | One instance of a record type, with a history of every response filed against it. |
| App | Several forms linked to a record type and filled as one guided session. |
Draft and published are different things
A form has a draft — what you see in the builder — and zero or more published versions. Editing changes the draft. Publishing copies the draft into a new numbered version and points the public link at it.
This is why a question you deleted this morning still appears on responses from last week: those responses were filed against a version that had it. Nothing rewrites history when you edit, which is what makes the data trustworthy months later.
A response is not a record
A response is an event: someone filled a form at a moment in time. A record is something that persists: a school, a patient, a supplier. One record accumulates many responses over months or years.
If you only ever need “who said what”, forms and responses are enough. If you need “everything we know about this school, in order”, you want a record type and an app. The record page then shows the whole timeline, and you can open any response in it without leaving the page.
Values and labels
Every choice option has a label — what a respondent reads — and a value— what gets stored. The distinction matters when you export: the value is what appears in the data, and it must stay stable. Renaming a district's label is harmless. Changing its value orphans every historical answer that referenced it.
This is also why retiring an option from a dropdown list deactivates it rather than deleting it. It stops being offered on new responses; old ones still resolve to a readable label instead of a bare code.
Two role axes, not one
Your organization role (Admin, Editor, Viewer) governs what you can do inside a workspace. Your system role (Super admin or ordinary user) governs platform administration.
These are independent. A super admin is not automatically an admin of any organization, and an organization admin has no platform access. See Team and roles.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a form and a data app?
- A form collects one set of answers. A data app links several forms to one subject — such as a school visited each quarter — so everything collected about it is filed in one record with a timeline.
- What is a published version?
- Publishing freezes a form as an immutable version. Each response records which version it was filled on, so later edits never change how earlier answers read.