Restrictions on Form Edits & Deletions

Hello, my organization uses forms for project intake and we have links to these forms embedded in tip sheets, our intranet, in guidance emails and a number of other places. However, there is nothing preventing users with editing access in any given project from inadvertently editing a form or even completely deleting it. We can re-create the forms of course, but then we have to find all the existing links that no longer work and replace them with the link to the new form.

We really need a way for project admins to restrict members of a project from editing or removing forms, and/or a way to restore forms (or prior versions of them, in the case of edits).

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It exactly happened to us a few weeks ago (complete delete of a form). Unfortunately, it was quite a complicated and heavily branched form. Fortunately, Asana support helps me restore the form.

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I take it the ‘can comment’ only option won’t work for you?

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That’s right, Danielle. We have a group of people who need the ability to create/remove tasks, edit fields in tasks, and otherwise progress them through our workflow, so making these users or the entire project “comment-only” won’t work for us.

Interestingly enough, I can create a Field to share in projects across my entire organization and lock it down so that only I can edit the Field, but this is not (yet) possible in Forms. That would be the ideal solution here, or perhaps applying the new Team Admins feature down to the Project level and restricting Form edits only to Team or Project Admins.

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Yeah I can see the need for sure!

Just checking you know that with ‘comment only’ they will get full functionality if they are assigned the task.

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I second the need for this option! We use a project template for tracking employee Time Off and some of our employees are more tech-saavy than others. They need to edit the project (i.e. tasks related to their time off) but when they go to submit a time off request via Workflow forms, many users are accidentally writing over the forms. It would be ideal if the form defaulted to a “View Form” mode when you click it from Workflow. If someone needed to edit it, you could click a button. In other words, could you switch the view and edit defaults?

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this is would be amazing. Someone is constantly writing over the form.

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Curious if there’s any progress on this? Or any future plans to set forms as “View” by default?

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Hi @Jan_Rajdl Asana Support told us they could not restore forms. Can you tell me who helped you? It feels like a crap shoot when one submits a help ticket. We didn’t hear for days. And when we received the response, he specifically said they cannot restore forms. The solution he suggested didn’t even come close to resolving our issue.

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Hmm, it’s strange. The person who helped me was Jahi. I guess that the possibility depends on what you really need to restore. I just needed to restore the form because of the complexity of branches and the number of questions, rules, etc. I had a complete URL and the URL of the target project and it was it.

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I’d like to add to this: the ability to see who made changes and when.

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Same! This is a much needed feature. I don’t want people in the company to inadvertently edit the form (it’s happened before). But I need them to be able to edit the TASK. Eg, to Add to project (multi-home) or edit the Description if something has changed after submission.

Really struggling at how to lock down edits to the form.

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Just echoing the need for this feature. I think this potentially could be MOSTLY solved with a few small UX changes, as we’ve had THREE separate team members who thought that they were filling out the form when they were actually editing it (and then two of them deleted the form, thinking that would clear their changes and not realizing that it would completely remove the whole form from existence).

Suggested ideas that could cut down on these issues:

  • Make the “View form” page the FIRST thing people see when they click on the form link from a project (and then “Edit Form” would be a button comparably small to how “View form” currently looks)
  • Create an “Are you sure” popup with strongly-worded verbiage if someone clicks “Delete Form” (e.g. “Are you sure you want to delete this form? This will not clear your changes, this will completely eliminate the form and no one will be able to use it again.”)
  • Give the form creator a toggle to stop others from modifying the form
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Very much needed, especially now that forms are shown at the top of sections. Everyone is editing the form rather than filling it out - the default should show the actual form to fill, editing should be a button and with even further permission restrictions.

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No updates on this yet? This is a big issue for us too.

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Are there no updates about this, yet?

@Kim_Högberg and @KNicks_8571d0,

Asana doesn’t publish a public roadmap so there won’t be any updates unless this feature is released; we’ll just have to wait and see.

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I support this issue. In fact I don’t really understand how editors can easily access a form in view mode without accidentally changing the forms. Default access rights for forms should be edit for the project admins and filling in for the project editors.