Workflow profiles

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Workflow profiles is a feature that gives you control over what users see during web data collection by attaching custom interface rules directly to user roles. Anyone with an attached workflow profile sees your customized interface, while users without workflow profiles attached remain unaffected and continue to see the default layout.

Designed to complement your broader strategy when designing a data collection workflow, workflow profiles allow you to tailor the user experience – hiding unneeded controls, pinning high-priority forms, customizing wording and color scheme, and guiding respondents smoothly through form sequences – without modifying user permissions.

Enterprise feature

Workflow profiles are available as part of SurveyCTO’s Enterprise subscription plan, and the feature must be enabled on your server before you can use it. If you would like to use workflow profiles, please get in touch via the Support Center, speak to your account manager, or subscribe to the Enterprise plan. Learn more about our pricing plans here.

This feature is useful when:

You want your data collectors to only see certain, necessary, or relevant options in the web data collection menu, and not the full, default list of options.
You run a case management workflow and want users to be brought directly to their case list at login, instead of having to choose from a menu.
Different user roles in the same project need different interfaces. For example, data collectors see a simplified option list while supervisors see the full set.
You want the interface to use your own wording or your organization’s colors, rather than the SurveyCTO defaults.
Your field staff move through a fixed sequence of forms and you want each submission to lead straight into the next one.

Workflow profiles change the interface, not permissions

A workflow profile only controls what a user sees. It does not change what they are allowed to do. For example, hiding the Fill Blank Form button does not revoke a user’s ability to fill out that form if they navigate to it directly.

Use workflow profiles to simplify and guide a user’s experience, and continue to use user roles and form-level permissions to control access.

What you can customize

A workflow profile is a set of configuration options to customize the user’s experience during web data collection, all of which are optional. Anything you leave out keeps its standard behavior, so a profile only changes the things you explicitly tell it to change. Below is a list of settings you can configure in a workflow profile:

Simplify the main menu. Hide any of the Fill Blank Form, Edit Saved Form, Delete Saved Form, and Manage Cases buttons, rename the ones you keep, or replace the whole menu with your own list of items (e.g. a specific form, a standard page, or a link to somewhere else).
Change the menu layout. Show the menu as the standard vertical buttons, as horizontal links across the top navigation bar, or as a custom set of items of your own that replaces the standard buttons entirely.
Set the landing page. Send users straight to a particular page – e.g. their case list – when they open web data collection, instead of the main menu.
Pin forms. Offer a short list of forms for quick access from within the form-filling interface, so users can move between the forms they need without going back to the menu. This option can be set for all forms in a workflow profile, or per form.
Streamline form filling. Skip the welcome screen, simplify, or skip the save-and-exit screen, submit automatically when the user reaches the end of a form, or send the user to a specific form or page after each submission. This option can be set for all forms in a workflow profile, or per form.
Customize the top menu. Hide the save button, options menu, or language selector, and rename or add items in the top bar and its drawer menu.
Hide form metadata. Show form titles on their own, without the form ID and version.
Include custom instructions. Replace the empty-state messages (for example, what users see when no cases are assigned to them) and add a welcome message and subtitle to the main menu.
Apply your colors. Override the default color scheme – e.g. primary color, backgrounds, borders, navigation bar, links, and more – across all of the web data collection pages. If you have uploaded an organization logo to your server, the main menu uses it automatically.
Translate your customized text. Provide the translated text for anything you set in a workflow profile, so your custom labels and messages can match the user’s interface language.

Web data collection only

Workflow profiles apply to data collection in the browser. They have no effect on SurveyCTO Collect for Android or iOS, which continue to use their own device settings.

Creating a workflow profile and attaching it to a user role

As of SurveyCTO 2.84, workflow profiles are managed through the server API rather than the server console. The user credentials for an Administrator with the Allow server API access permission enabled are required to create, change, or delete workflow profiles.

Briefly, the workflow involves:

Listing existing workflow profiles
Creating new workflow profiles
Attaching workflow profiles to user roles
Updating workflow profiles
Detaching or deleting workflow profiles

See the SurveyCTO Developer Portal for detailed steps and examples.

Things to keep in mind

Customizations to workflow profiles are optional. Keeping the defaults means showing everything. Any setting you don’t change in a workflow profile keeps its standard behavior, so you only need to configure what you want to change.
Main menu settings vs. direct form links. Navigation settings – like custom layouts or landing pages – apply only to users logged in to web data collection. Anonymous respondents opening a direct link bypass the menu entirely, so they will only see form-level settings like theme colors.
Pinned forms respect form access. If a user cannot see one of the forms you pinned, it is discreetly left out of their menu rather than shown and then refused. A user also won’t see a pinned form in their menu if they are currently filling it out.
Translating custom text uses locale_overrides. Locale_overrides use ISO language codes: If you want to add French or Spanish translations to your wording customizations, insert “fr” or “es”. Locale_overrides only need to contain the text you want translated. Overrides also adjust based on the user’s interface language. If a user switches to a different language, if you have set an override for that language, they will see that new language as well. If you have not set an override for the language a user switches to, they will see the default text and language.
Links can point wherever you need them to, as long as they’re secure. Users can be directed to landing pages, the page you send users to after submission, or custom menu items, either to a path on your own server, such as /collect/cases.html, or a full web address. This means you can send people on to your own intranet, a partner’s site, or a thank-you page you host elsewhere.

Note: Every web address you give must be a secure one, beginning with https://. SurveyCTO web data collection is served over a secure connection and handles your respondents’ answers, so a profile cannot send anyone from a SurveyCTO web form to an insecure http:// page. Addresses that begin // are refused too.
Renaming a few labels vs. rewording everything. Workflow profile labels are a great option when different user roles need different wording. If you want to change wording across the entire web data collection interface for everybody, customize the interface language file instead – see translating web forms. When both are in effect, the label in the workflow profile wins.
There is no console interface yet. Profiles are created and attached through the API as of SurveyCTO 2.84; managing them from the server console is planned for a later version.

For the full list of configuration options, together with request and response details for each endpoint, see the SurveyCTO Developer Portal.