Roles enable you to customize a form based on who is working with the form and its entry. You can use roles to drive your workflows in a number of ways, including:
- Sending secure, role-based workflow links via email
- Conditionally showing fields or sections based on role
- Allowing actions for specific roles
- Setting fields as required or read-only
Role Type
When considering those involved in your workflow, it’s helpful to specify each person’s responsibility in the process and how that informs their relationship to entry data. As a best practice, you’ll want to assign a role for each person involved in your workflow.
A workflow within Cognito Forms will include one Public role and one Internal role by default. You can assign as many Other role types as needed.
Public Roles
The Public role type is the default role for new form submissions. In other words, think of this role as an individual who kicks off the workflow process by submitting a new entry. Only one role can be assigned as a Public role type.
Internal Roles
The Internal role type is the default role for new entry views, meaning this role represents an individual who will be on the receiving end of an entry. Only one role can be assigned as an Internal role type.
Other Roles
The Other role type is available for any other individual that needs to be involved in the workflow after an entry has been submitted. As with all roles, you’ll be able to assign Other roles conditional form visibility, allow for specific actions, and share role-based workflow links.
Give Access To
Assign a role to specific members of your organization. Once you’ve assigned someone to a role, they can access role-based entry views on the Entries page.
Workflow role permissions work on a form-by-form basis. For example, let’s say that your form has a ‘Manager’ role. If you assign someone to this role, they can access any entry views set to the same role. Within that entry view, they have the ability to create new entries as well as edit existing entries.
Select the dropdown at the bottom of the Edit Role dialog to view the list of users assigned to the role. Users have different levels of access based on their form permission level:
- Users with Administrator or Editor permissions have access to all entry views and will automatically appear on the list of assigned users.
- Users with Reviewer permissions can access all entry views, but cannot make changes (such as editing entries) without being assigned to a workflow role.
- Users with Limited Access permissions can only access entries when they’re assigned to a workflow role.
To remove a role assignment, click the trashcan icon next to the user’s name.
Assigning Limited Access users
In some cases, you may want to give someone access to a specific entry view without allowing them to make changes to your form or view all the entries. To invite a Limited Access user with specific workflow role permissions:
Invite the user to your organization and set their permission level to Limited Access.
Once the user has accepted their invitation, give them access to the appropriate workflow role (Ex: Accounting). Make sure to save both the Edit Role dialog and your form.
On the Entries page, create a new entry view. In the view settings, click Set Role and select the specified workflow role. Don’t forget to remove/rearrange columns and sort/filter the entry view as needed.
Adding a role
There is a maximum limit of 20 roles within a workflow.
You can add, change or remove roles from the Build page of your form:
- Click Workflow on your form’s Build page to open the Workflow menu.
- Within the Workflow menu, click Roles. To edit an existing role, click on the name of the role type. To add a new role, select + Add Role. Each role name must be unique.
- For Role Type, select whether the role should be Public, Internal or Other.
- Click Save.
To rearrange the order of your roles, simply click and drag the role name within the Workflow menu. The order in which your roles appear won’t impact your workflow, however reordering them may be helpful in thinking through your process.
Changing a role
If you need to change the name of a role at any point within your workflow, you’re able to do so within the Workflow menu. All calculations and conditional logic will automatically update with the new name of the role once your changes have been saved.
If you need to change the type of a role between Public, Internal or Other, just remember to update any existing email notifications to include the adjusted role-based workflow link as needed.
Deleting a role
Before deleting a role you’ll want to consider if it’s referenced by anything within your workflow, such as:
If a role is included in a calculation or conditional logic, the calculation or logic referencing the deleted role will continue to work with the exception of the deleted role. Additionally, any existing workflow links for the deleted role will no longer work. Any document templates that reference a deleted role will default to display for the Public role instead.
To delete a role, click the trashcan icon next to the role name. Please note that roles that have been assigned as Public or Internal cannot be deleted.
Reviewer Roles
The Reviewer role is only relevant to forms created prior to September 26, 2022.
If you see a Reviewer role type under Roles in your Workflow settings, this means you had previously sent a View Link related to your form. Reviewer roles are reserved for these past read-only links, and will therefore default to a read-only view when the role is referenced throughout your workflow.
When assigning workflow role permissions, please note that users assigned to the Reviewer role have different levels of access based on their form permission level:
- Users with Reviewer permissions assigned to the Reviewer role can see all entry views, but cannot edit entries. They can only perform actions for the entry view they’ve been assigned to.
- Users with Limited access permissions assigned to the Reviewer role cannot edit entries or see all entry views. They can only perform actions for the entry view they’ve been assigned to.