Sharing Forms

Mapalyze makes it easy to share forms with your team, external collaborators, or even the public. This article covers the different ways to share forms and how to control who can access them.

Sharing within your organization

By default, published forms are available to all members of your organization. When you publish a form, every team member with a Collector, Editor, or Admin role can see and use it.

Restricting forms to specific projects

If you want to limit a form's visibility to a subset of your team:

1. Open the form in the Form Builder.
2. Click Settings (the gear icon).
3. Under Access, select Project-based.
4. Choose the project(s) this form belongs to.
5. Click Save, then Publish.

Only team members assigned to those projects will see the form. This is useful for organizations with multiple departments, regions, or clients that should not see each other's forms.

Restricting forms to specific roles

You can also limit which roles can use a form:

1. In the form settings, under Access, set the Minimum Role to use the form.
2. For example, setting the minimum role to Editor means only Editors and Admins can collect data with this form. Collectors and Viewers would not see it.

This feature is uncommon but helpful for administrative forms like team self-assessments or manager checklists.

Sharing with external collaborators

Sometimes you need to share a form with people outside your organization -- contractors, volunteers, clients, or partner agencies. Mapalyze offers two approaches:

Guest access

Invite external collaborators as Guest users:

1. Go to Settings then Team.
2. Click Invite Member.
3. Enter the external person's email address.
4. Select the Guest role.
5. Assign them to a specific project.

Guest users can only access the specific project they are assigned to. They cannot see other projects, organization settings, or team members outside their project. Guests can collect data and view their own submissions.

Guest users count toward your plan's member limit but have restricted access by design.

Public form links

For situations where you need many people to submit data without creating accounts, use a public form link:

1. Open the form in the Form Builder.
2. Click Share in the top toolbar.
3. Toggle on Public Link.
4. Copy the generated URL.

Anyone with the link can open the form in their web browser and submit a record. No Mapalyze account is required. Public submissions include the submitter's browser location (if they grant permission) but not any user identity.

Use cases for public links:

• Community reporting (potholes, hazards, wildlife sightings)
• Customer feedback with location data
• Event check-ins with GPS tagging
• Volunteer data collection campaigns

Public link settings

You can configure additional options for public links:

• Require email -- Ask the submitter to provide an email address (not verified).
• Limit submissions -- Set a maximum number of total submissions or submissions per IP address.
• Expiration date -- Set a date when the link stops accepting submissions.
• Custom thank-you message -- Display a message after successful submission.

Sharing form templates

If you have built a form that could be useful for other teams or organizations, you can share it as a template:

1. Open the form in the Form Builder.
2. Click Settings then Export as Template.
3. Download the template file (.json format).

Share this file with others. They can import it into their own Mapalyze account:

1. Go to Forms then New Form.
2. Click Import Template.
3. Upload the .json file.
4. The form is created as a new draft in their account, ready to customize and publish.

Template sharing does not include any data -- only the form structure, field configurations, and conditional logic rules.

Embedding forms

You can embed a Mapalyze form directly into your own website or application:

1. Open the form and click Share.
2. Select the Embed tab.
3. Copy the embed code (an iframe snippet).
4. Paste the code into your website's HTML.

The embedded form works identically to the public link version, including GPS capture and photo upload. Submissions appear in your Mapalyze dashboard alongside records collected through the mobile app.

Managing shared access

To review who has access to a specific form:

1. Open the form settings.
2. Click the Access tab.
3. You will see a summary of how the form is shared: which projects it belongs to, whether a public link is active, and how many people have access.

To revoke access:

• For team members: Remove them from the project or change their role.
• For public links: Toggle off the public link to immediately stop accepting new submissions.
• For guests: Remove the guest user from the project in Team settings.

Revoking access does not delete any data that has already been collected. Previous submissions remain in your database.