Forms Portal | Handling user data

AEM Forms portal provides components that you can use to list adaptive forms, HTML5 forms, and other Forms assets on AEM Sites page. In addition, you can configure it to display drafts and submitted adaptive forms and HTML5 forms for a logged-in user. For more information about forms portal, see Introduction to publishing forms on a portal.

When a logged-in user saves an adaptive form as draft or submits it, they are displayed in the Drafts and Submissions tabs on forms portal. The data for drafts or submitted forms is stored in the data store configured for AEM deployment. The drafts and submissions of anonymous users are not displayed on forms portal page; however, the data is stored in the configured data store. For more information, see Configuring storage services for drafts and submissions.

User data and data stores

Forms portal stores data for draft and submitted forms in following scenarios:

• The submit action configured in the adaptive form is Forms Portal Submit Action.
• For submit actions other than Forms Portal Submit Action, the Store data in forms portal option is enabled in the Submission properties of the adaptive form container.

For every draft and submitted form for logged-in and anonymous users, forms portal stores the following data:

• Form metadata such as the form name, form path, draft or submission ID, attachments path, and user data ID
• Form attachment as data bytes
• Form data as data bytes

Depending on the configured data store persistence, drafts and submitted forms data is stored at the following locations.

Access and delete user data

You can access draft and submitted forms data for logged-in and anonymous users in the configured data stores, and if required, delete it.

AEM instances

All drafts and submitted forms data in AEM instances (author, publish, or remote) for logged-in and anonymous users are stored in the /content/forms/fp/ node of the applicable AEM repository. Every time a logged-in or anonymous user saves a draft or submits a form, a draft ID or submission ID, a user data ID, and a random ID for each attachment (if applicable) is generated, which is associated with the respective draft or submission.

Access user data

When a logged-in user saves a draft or submits a form, a child node is created with her user ID. For example, drafts and submissions data for Sarah Rose whose user ID is srose are stored in /content/forms/fp/srose/ node in AEM repository. Within the user ID node, the data is organized in a hierarchical structure.

The following table explains how the data for all drafts by srose is stored in AEM repository.

Delete user data

To delete user data from drafts and submissions for a logged-in user from AEM systems completely, you must delete the user ID node for a specific user from the author node. You must manually delete data from all applicable AEM instances.

Drafts and submission data for all anonymous users is stored within the common drafts and submit nodes under /content/forms/fp/anonymous. There is no method to find data for a particular anonymous user unless some identifiable information is known. In this case, you can search for the information that identifies the anonymous user in AEM repository and manually delete the node containing it from all applicable AEM instances to remove data from the AEM system. However, to delete data for all anonymous users, you can delete the anonymous node to remove drafts and submissions data for all anonymous users.

Database

When AEM is configured to store data in a database, forms portal draft and submission data is stored in the following database tables for both logged-in and anonymous users:

• data
• metadata
• additionalmetadata

Access user data

To access drafts and submissions data for a logged-in and anonymous users in the database tables, run the following database command. In the query, replace logged-in user with the user ID whose data you want to access or with anonymous for anonymous users.

select * from metadata, data, additionalmetadatatable where metadata.owner = 'logged-in user' and metadata.id = additionalmetadatatable.id and metadata.userdataID = data.id

Delete user data

To delete drafts and submissions data for a logged-in user from the database tables, run the following database command. In the query, replace logged-in user with the user ID whose data you want to delete or with anonymous for anonymous users. Note that to delete data for a particular anonymous user from the database, you need to find it using some identifiable information and delete it from database tables containing the information.

DELETE FROM metadata, data, additionalmetadatatable USING metadata INNER JOIN data ON metadata.userdataID = data.id INNER JOIN additionalmetadatatable ON metadata.id = additionalmetadatatable.id WHERE metadata.owner = 'logged-in user'

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