Embedding

Place Formsort flows within a larger webpage.

Formsort flows may be embedded within other web pages.

Use custom domains for conversion rate-sensitive use cases to maximize page load speed

Embed snippet

After deploying a flow, you will be shown both the direct link as well as embed options:

Paste the snippet shown in this page into your HTML, or using a tag manager like Google Tag Manager or segment.

Styles

Modal

If embedded as a modal, the flow will load above the rest of your page content.

Inline

If embedded inline, the flow will be mounted at the element that you provide using a CSS selector.

Popover

If embedded as a popover, the flow will be shown at one of the corners of the screen, as an overlay.

Load immediately

If load immediately is checked, then the flow will immediately load and be shown to the responder.

If unchecked, you will need to call _formsort.load() when you wish to display the flow. This will be auto-generated with the form details in the snippet configuration modal.

// Example
_formsort.load({c:'<Client_label>',f:'<flow_label>',v:'<variant_label'})

Load with URL parameters

If Load with URL parameters is checked, then any URL search parameters will be forwarded to the embed at load time.

Forwarding URL search parameters to the embed

Keep in mind that url parameters that don't correspond to answer variable names or whitelisted as External answers will be ignored and unavailable within Formsort.

Whitelisting embedding domains

By default, a flow can be embedded within any website. For greater security over where your forms can appear, you can whitelist embedding domains from the 'Allowed embedding domains' section of the Account page --> Security tab.

By adding one or more domains to the list of allowed embedding domains, no other domain will be permitted to host your flow.

Another advantage of whitelisting certain domains is that this allows answer submission data to flow to the parent URL.

If you have multiple domains, such as 'staging.formort.com' and 'development.formsort.com,' you can use the asterisk wildcard: '*.formsort.com.'

More control: Web Embed API

The Formsort web-embed API provides more control over the Formsort embed. Most importantly, it provides lifecycle event callbacks corresponding to the analytics events, allowing you to trigger certain actions on FlowLoaded, FlowFinalized, EmailCollected, etc.

One use of this would be listening for FlowFinalized, which is dispatched when the flow is finalized, in order to remove the element in which the form is rendered, or to show custom congratulations content to your responder.

Embeds may also intercept and cancel redirects by returning an object { cancel: true } in the redirect handlers.

Finally, if you explicit whitelist a domain in Security --> 'Allowed embedding domain,' then you can also receive answer submission data on analytics events, allowing you to trigger specific actions in your app based on users' answers.

Embedding forms using React

The Formsort React component allows for use of a Formsort flow within a React render tree, in addition to providing more lifecycle callbacks.

import React from "react";
import EmbedFlow from "@formsort/react-embed";

const EmbedFlowExample: React.FunctionComponent = () => (
  <div>
    <EmbedFlow
      clientLabel="formsort"
      flowLabel="onboarding"
      variantLabel="main"
      queryParams={[['formsortEnv','staging']]}
      embedConfig={{
        style: {
          width: "100%",
          height: "100%"
        }
      }}
      // Lifecycle callback examples
      onFlowLoaded={() => {console.log("Flow has loaded!")}}
      onStepCompleted={(answers) => console.log(answers)}
      onFlowFinalized={(answers) => console.log(answers)}
    />
  </div>
);

Check out our guide to Setting up a dev environment if you plan on using any of the above three embed options.

Things to Consider

Embedding a flow within a larger page can be easy to set up, but has some caveats:

Scrolling

If your flow has long steps with many questions, the flow may be vertically taller than the viewport's size and consequently will display with scroll bars.

If the embedding page itself also has scrolling, this can result in a detrimental user experience, as browsers sometimes cannot correctly identify which content the user intends to scroll.

URL navigation

URL navigation -- the ability to use forward and back buttons to navigate through a flow by placing the step index in the URL -- is not currently supported for embedded flows. However, when a responder is visiting a non-embedded flow on a custom domain, Formsort controls the URL, and therefore URL navigation is possible (assuming the Enable URL navigation option in the Settings > Behavior tab is enabled). So, if a user will expect forward and back buttons to work, such as for mobile swipe gestures, consider using a custom domain rather than an embedded flow.

Loading performance

When using an embed, the embed script must first load, which only then starts loading the flow, requiring an additional request. This might lead to a slightly-slower initial load time.

Zoom in/out in mobile screens

If your embedded flow looks small in mobile screen or zooms in too much when tapping on inputs, you should set the viewport meta tag in your main site. Put the following code snippet into thehead section of your main site.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no">

If you don't want to prevent zoom in because of accessibility concerns you can set maximum-scale value to 3. For more details about viewport, you can check MDN docs.