How QuickBase Form works

QuickBase has an excellent Form Wizard.  If you don't like the Form Wizard, it's pretty easy to code up an HTML form using their API.  But, these approaches have some downsides. 

For one, you need to modify the form on your website.  Many websites are built using a CMS, which makes using the form wizard tough.  Sometimes you've spent thousands of dollars working with a web design firm, and you're not psyched about having to change their work. 

For another, the form has to actually post to QuickBase.  So, your customers get sent to QuickBase instead of your own landing page. You can supply a "return url", which will tell QuickBase to send your customers back to your page.  Which is totally transparent and works...most of the time.  Except if QuickBase is having an (infrequent) outage.  Or you have permissions setup wrong.  Or someone deleted the target database. 

What if you have fields  that you want to record locally and not keep in QuickBase?  Perhaps there's secure information, or a file upload, or voluminous analytical data.  With the form wizard this is impossible, and even with the API it's tough without running server-side code in PHP or ASP. 

QuickBase Form is a simple way around these issues.  It works as a JavaScript plugin, using the popular jQuery javascript framework.  It's simple to install, just copy some boilerplate to the of your HTML document and set up a simple field mapping.  It doesn't change the form or any CSS or HTML. 

It works by intercepting the form's submit.  When you click your forms "submit" button, QBForm bundles the data according to your mapping and submits it to QuickBase.  Then, whether it succeeds or fails, the form is submitted like normal.