Personalised links & prefill
Label a link, fill in what you already know, and see which link every response came through.
Last updated August 12, 2026
A personalised link (Pro) is an ordinary link to your form with two additions: a Label only you can read, and — if you want it — answers you filled in ahead of time. Every response that arrives through that link shows the label in your inbox, in the submission itself, and in every export. You find them under the form's Share tab, below the public link and QR code.
Creating one
Open the form and go to Share
The tab sits after Settings. Personalised links are below the public link and QR code.
Press New link
Give it a Label
The text you want to see beside every response this link brings in. Up to 100 characters.
Add a Note if it helps you
Optional, up to 500 characters. It is a reminder for you — never shown to anyone filling the form, though it does appear in your exports.
Press Create link, and copy the link
The finished link opens in its own dialog, with the link in full and a QR code. You can reopen it any time — click the link's row, or choose Share in its menu.
Copy the whole link
Everything after the # is what opens the prefilled answers, and it is never sent to our servers — that is why we cannot read a prefill. If the link is shortened, re-typed, or pasted without that part, the form still opens: it simply arrives empty and unlabelled. The QR code in the share dialog holds the same complete link, so treat that image as privately as the link itself.
A link is not limited to one person. Send it to one supplier, or to a whole class, a department, a mailing — whatever the label means to you is what it means. That is also why nothing in the app calls it a name or a recipient: the column in your inbox is simply From.
Filling answers in advance
In the link's row menu, choose Prefill answers. Your form opens the way the people you send it to will see it, and you can type into any question. Save when you are done — a prefill is partial by definition, so required questions may stay empty and nothing is validated.
- Prefilled answers stay editable. Someone who sees a wrong detail corrects it on the spot; you are giving them a head start, not a locked form.
- File uploads and signatures cannot be prefilled. They appear in the prefill view but stay switched off — those answers live outside the form's data, and it was never meaningful to sign on somebody's behalf.
- Prefill unlocks after the first publish. It always shows the published version of the form, because that is the version people receive. Creating and sharing links works before that — only the prefilling waits.
If you edit the form afterwards, the prefill is checked against it the next time you open it. An answer whose question you deleted, or whose type you changed, is dropped and reported in one line. The link's row shows a Needs review chip when that check would actually drop something — republishing on its own does not raise it. The check reads the prefill, so the chip appears once your labels are unlocked.
Hidden questions
Any question can be switched to Hidden in its Advanced settings. A hidden question never appears to anyone filling the form, but you can prefill it and its value comes back with the response — a campaign name, a course number, which mailing a link belonged to. Because nobody can answer it, switching Hidden on also switches required off. File upload and signature questions cannot be hidden, for the same reason they cannot be prefilled.
A hidden question's name is not secret
Hidden means nobody has to look at it or answer it — not that nobody can find out it exists. The question's text travels to every browser that opens the form, so anyone curious enough to read the page source can see that a field called source or internal reference is there. The same goes for a rule written against a hidden question: "show this question when source is august-mailing" carries august-mailing with the form. The answer is the protected part: that is carried by the link and readable only by whoever holds it. So put the sensitive part in the answer, never in the field's name and never in a rule that compares against it.
Reading the label back
Labels are encrypted with your form's key, so they appear once your Vault key is entered — the same unlock that shows you response contents. Until then the From column shows a locked marker rather than an error.
- Submissions list — a From column, in both the form's own inbox and the all-forms inbox.
- The response itself — the label appears as a chip beside the date when you open it.
- Exports — two extra columns, From and Note, next to the submission ID and date in CSV and Excel; the JSON export carries the same pair per response. A form with no personalised links exports exactly what it exported before.
A response that arrived through the plain link — or through a link somebody forwarded with the # part removed — simply shows —. That is not an error; it is a response you cannot attribute.
Turning a link off, and deleting it
| Action | What happens to the link | What happens to responses already received |
|---|---|---|
| Deactivate | Stops working. Anyone opening it gets the form with no prefill. | Keep their label. Nothing changes. |
| Delete | Gone, and the id is never reused. | Lose their label permanently. They stay in your inbox, but the From column shows — from then on, in the app and in every future export. |
Deactivate is almost always the one you want. Delete cannot be undone, and there is no copy of the label anywhere else — we never had one to keep.
What a link proves, and what it does not
A link identifies, it does not authenticate
There is no password and nobody is asked to prove who they are. Whoever receives a personalised link can forward it, and the person who then fills the form in will arrive under your label. Treat the label as a note about where a response came from — reliable for organising your own work, not evidence of who wrote it. For anything that has to be restricted, use an unlock code as well.
What we can see. The label and the note are encrypted in your browser before the link is saved — only your Vault key opens them, and no support request or court order changes that, because we have nothing to hand over. The prefilled answers are encrypted with a key that exists nowhere but inside the link itself. What we do store in plain form is which link a response came through, as a random 12-character id: we can tell that two responses arrived through the same link, and never whose link it is.
If you prefill data about somebody
Nothing tells the person filling the form that their link was personalised, and a hidden field is by definition something they do not see. If you attach personal data on somebody's behalf — a reference, a customer number, a category you assigned them — that is still their data. Your privacy notice needs to cover it, and they can ask you what you attached (GDPR / Swiss nDSG).