Over the last few Drupal releases, the Webform module has been the standard for creating robust forms and surveys. While this venerable module has served the community’s needs quite well, major releases of Drupal often afford the opportunity to take a fresh look at how common problems are solved, leveraging new technologies and concepts introduced in the release.
Baked into Core
Since Drupal 4.6, Drupal Core has shipped with a basic contact form module that had limited functionality. Finally, the contact module got some much-needed attention in Drupal 8. Contact forms are now fieldable entities, allowing us to build forms with the same fields we build content types, taxonomies, and other entities with.
Building Out the Form
Forms are created and managed by navigating to Structure->Contact Forms in the Admin menu. From here, choose “Add contact form.”
This takes us to a form for setting the name of the form, email addresses for submissions to be sent to, and optionally an auto-reply message to the submitter. Once saved, we are taken back to the Contact Forms admin page.
This gives us a basic form with Sender Name and Email, a Subject field, and a basic text area for a Message. To add fields to our new form, we need to select the “Manage Fields” option in the Operations dropdown. From here, we can add any of the field types available on the site.
Form Display
To customize how the form is displayed, we want to select the “Manage Form Display” option in the Operations dropdown. This will allow us to change the order of the fields for the form, change configurations for each field, and allow us to disable any fields that are provided by default that we don’t want to use.
Manage Display
Similar to Form Display, if we want to change the order and display of fields in the submission emails, using the “Manage Display” option will allow us reorder or hide fields from showing in the submission email.
Submission Storage and Export
Everything we’ve covered so far is great if we want to build out a form and start getting submissions by email. However, if we want to save and view submissions in the site or want to export the submissions in bulk, we need to look to some contributed modules to fill in the gaps.
Contact Storage Module
As its name implies, the Contact Storage module addresses the need for a central location from which content editors can review and manage form submissions on the site. The module also provides Views integration as well as some additional customization options for our forms. The default configuration provides these features for us, so we can install the module and start benefitting from it immediately.
Submission Exports
We now have robust forms and a place to centrally store their submissions, with Views giving us the ability to build out lists of submissions. What we’re still missing at this point is a way to download the submissions in bulk, and it’s fairly common to want such an export in a format like CSV that can be loaded into a spreadsheet application. To achieve that, we can put our Views integration to use, along with Drupal 8’s REST Module, and the CSV Serialization module.
Once these modules are installed, create a new view of Contact Messages and check the “Create a REST Export” option, providing the path we will navigate to trigger the export. Then hit Save and Edit to continue configuring the view.
In the format section of the view configuration page, we see the format is set to “Serializer”. Here, we want to configure the settings for Serializer, and select the “csv” format.
At this point we have a working view that will export all submissions as a CSV. We can leave the view set to show content as “Entity,” which will export all fields for the submission, or we can switch the display to “Fields,” which will allow us to specify the fields we want in the export, and how they are formatted.
With exports now provided by Views, we can create custom exports for specific forms, or we can utilize Exposed Filters and Contextual Filters to provide an export that works for all forms, allowing users to choose how they want the export filtered.
More Form Solutions in Contrib
If we need to provide robust survey forms now, the approach covered here is currently the most stable and ready to implement. If this solution doesn’t meet your use case, it might be worth taking a look at eForm, the Drupal 8 version of the Entityform module introduced in Drupal 7. There is also still some discussion of a Drupal 8 port of the Webform module, so it’s possible with enough interest we could have a few different solutions for providing front-facing forms to end users.
While building forms will be a bit different in Drupal 8 compared to previous versions, the experience is more in line with what we’ve come to expect from building Content Types and other fieldable entities. This provides the opportunity for more flexibility and functionality when building front-facing forms, and the Views integration provides the opportunity to present and export the submitted form data just the way we need.