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How to Build a Public Salesforce Form in Five Steps (No Code)
By TwinStack Team ·
You don’t need a developer, a connector or a third-party subscription to put a form on the web and have the answers land in Salesforce. Here is the whole process with Smart Forms & Surveys, from first-time setup to the first submission.
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Step 1: Set up once
Public forms are served through a Salesforce Site named PublicForm. The app’s Get started page checks for it and shows a green card when the site is found and active. If it isn’t, the Setup instructions walk an admin through five short tasks in Salesforce Setup: builder access, the public site, visitor access, a sharing rule and the link address. Click Recheck when you’re done.
Until the site is ready, form building is paused. That is deliberate, so nobody builds a form that visitors can’t open.
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Step 2: Choose what each response creates
Choose Create a new form, give it a name and pick the object each response should create. It can be any Salesforce object you can create records in, such as a Lead, a Case or your own custom object. Fields Salesforce needs to save the record are added for you and marked with a red asterisk.
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Step 3: Pick and arrange the questions
Tick the fields you want and arrange them with the arrows. Text, email, phone, website, numbers, currency, percent, picklists, multi-select picklists, dates, date and time, checkboxes and long text are all supported. You can rename any label to suit your audience.
Lookup fields such as Owner stay hidden from visitors until you configure them, because visitors can’t know record Ids. You can apply a fixed record automatically (optionally showing its name) or let visitors choose from up to 25 records you select. Visitors never see or send a record Id.
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Step 4: Add the smart parts
Open a question with the pencil icon and switch on Only show this field for certain answers. Choose the controlling picklist or checkbox, tap the answers that should reveal the question, then use Try it to preview the behaviour before you save. A field depends on one controlling question, and several answers can show it.
Two more switches are worth knowing about. File uploads let visitors attach up to five files to a submission. A close time shuts the form automatically at a deadline; you can close or reopen it by hand at any point, and stored submissions are never touched.
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Step 5: Save, share and review
Click Save & generate form. That is what publishes your changes, so visitors only see an edit after you save. Each save of an existing form raises its version number by one.
Copy the public link, or use Visitor view to see exactly what people will see, then paste the link into an email, a chat message or a button on your website.
Open Submissions to see what arrived. Select any entry to see what the visitor sent and the record it created, and use the Has error filter to find anything Salesforce rejected. The error message says what to fix.
A tip for your first form
Start small: three or four fields, one object, no logic. Publish it, submit a test response yourself, and confirm the record looks right. Once that works, add conditional questions and uploads one at a time.