Live preview overview
See the current state of a flow without deploying.
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See the current state of a flow without deploying.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
The Live Preview window lets you see your form take shape in real time, reflecting changes to content, styling, logic, and integrations as you build. It’s a safe space to experiment: answers are discarded on reload, and no data is sent to your response storage, production systems, or integrations.
The preview window also simulates the viewport dimensions your users will encounter — from the average desktop screen (1440×1024) all the way down to a compact mobile display like the iPhone SE (375×667).
To open the Live Preview, click PREVIEW in the top-right corner of a variant. It will open the preview in a new browser tab.
The preview window gives you enhanced navigation not available in a real form—for example, skipping directly to a specific step without filling out previous questions.
Stuck in the preview window?
To directly modify or inspect the current values of answers in the form, click Set answers in the bottom-left of the Live Preview window.
Fixtures allow you to save the current state of answers in in your Preview testing. These saved states can be reloaded in future editing sessions, making them especially helpful for flows with complex logic or long progressions.
Instead of repeatedly filling out the same path, you can jump straight into a known scenario—speeding up testing and iteration.
The Fixtures menu also provides a shareable URL that loads this saved answer path into a published version of your form. This is useful for validating how specific logic performs in a live environment without having to recreate the scenario manually.
Clicking Events captured on the bottom-right of the Live Preview window will show the events and payloads that would have been sent to the third-party analytics integrations you have configured for the form.
Clicking the gear icon at the right side of the preview window will bring up advanced settings.
Your users will view your forms on a variety of devices - consequently, it's a good idea to test on various form factors. The built-in viewports allow you to access common device resolutions quickly.
Note that you can also resize the preview itself to see how your layout performs in different-sized containers.
The preview window normally discards all saved answers, and does not send analytics events, instead logging them to the window. If you would like to instead send data to your real integrations, to test that everything is connected, you can choose one of your environments in which to load the form.
If show all is checked, questions will always be visible, even if they are conditionally enabled and the dependent condition has not been evaluated. This may be helpful when building flows with lots of inline conditions.
If you are having trouble progressing forward in a flow in the preview window, or if expected behavior like a redirect is not behaving as expected, try starting from the beginning, and filling out all answers along the way, like a responder would. For more involved testing, you might want to publish to a , giving you a more close-to-production experience.
If you have , your flows will be available not only on flow.formsort.com, but any domains that you have set up. The preview window loads using your default domain, but if you would like to change it, you can do so using the host setting. This may be useful for troubleshooting CORS issues with API calls, but generally you shouldn't have to change this.
