Solved: Submitting a form that's hidden best practice

I have an app that has various screens, including a screen that the user doesn't navigate to - it's merely used to hold an edit form. I have various combo boxes, checkboxes and text fields in the app that are linked to specific fields in that form. When a user selects a choice in the combo box or fills in a text box, it auto-fills a field in that form. When the user clicks the save button, it submits the hidden form and makes an item in a SharePoint list that it's linked to.

For about a year this hidden form has been working fine, absolutely no problems at all. Recently it has decided it no longer wants to work like this and makes an item with almost no information in any of the columns. The way I fixed this is by moving the form on to the last page that the user gets to and setting Visible to false. All information is saved properly to the list again and the world is spinning as intended.

My questions are to learn more essentially:

The behaviour of this form makes me think that because the form is on a hidden page that the user doesn't navigate to, the form isn't loading anything - could this be true
The way I designed this form with the hidden screen was because of the way that our clients wanted the boxes and fields laid out (nothing game changing by any standards, I just couldn't get the boxes to line up properly between form cards) - what is best practice when it comes to saving forms to SP? was the form on a hidden screen bad practice?

Feel free to ask any questions or give criticism (saying that it's purely a skill issue is even acceptable to me lol)

Thanks!

Categories:

General Questions

The hidden form not loading because the user doesn’t navigate to it is the most likely issue. The recommended approach for handling form submissions effectively includes:

Ensuring that forms are on a screen that the user navigates to.
Using Patch() instead of SubmitForm() for better control over what gets submitted.
Keeping forms visible but hidden using Visible = false rather than placing them on an entirely inaccessible screen.
Using a variable to load the default record into the form explicitly (e.g., Form1.Default = varRecord).

The best practice for saving forms to SharePoint is to ensure the form is initialized correctly and all fields are populated before submission. Your fix aligns with these recommendations, making the app more reliable.