If you have the Visforms component installed on your website and you have forms that are configured to save the results, you should have a plan for managing that data. Often times the data is sensitive and should not remain in the website database indefinitely.
To check if you have data:
- If you will be accessing the data from a network outside of Rutgers, first log into a VPN connection or to a computer located on campus using remote access.
- Login to the administrator interface.
- Select Components > Visforms > Forms:
- Then see if you have a number in the "Data" column for each form. That's the number of data submissions there are for that form:
If you do have data it's easy to export it to Excel and then delete it from the database.
Exporting and deleting form data:
- Start by clicking on the number in the "Data" column for the associated form.
- The default the number of records displayed is set to 20. In order to display all of the submitted records, select a number higher than the total number of records:
- Click the check boxes for all the Unpublished records and click Actions > Publish.
- Then select all the records and click the Export button.
- The data export file will be downloaded to your computer (most likely to the "Downloads" folder).
- Open the data export file and verify that the records you selected to export are found in the Excel file.
- Choose "File > Save As," select a folder destination, make the File Name more descriptive, change "Save As Type" to "Excel Workbook", and click "Save."
- In Visforms, select all the records you exported and click Actions > Delete.
- Click Yes when asked "Do you really want to delete the dataset(s)?"
For more on Visforms, see the Forms section of our How To Guides.
