We’re pleased to announce that Entry Automation 5.0 will be available over WordPress auto-update and our downloads page beginning December 7th, 2021.
With version 5.0, we’ve added some very exciting new features that can take your automations to even bigger heights, including allowing you to do more than just exporting or deleting entries with Entry Automation.
## Added Support for Save and Continue Draft Submissions
Gravity Forms’ built in Save and Continue feature is a great way to allow your users to save their entered values and come back at a later time to resume and complete the form. This is a great feature from the user’s perspective, but from an administrator or site owner standpoint, it isn’t the most accessible data in the world until that user resumes and completes the form.
Unless you’re using the Partial Entries add-on, which creates a partial entry in the event a user saves their form, this data is totally inaccessible to any site admins unless they go into the draft submissions table Gravity Forms creates in the database and manually read or pull those records out for archival purposes. This can lead to you losing leads if these potential submitters never come back and submit the form, and they’ll delete themselves after a certain amount of days from the last time the submission was saved by the user.
With Entry Automation 5.0, the above frustration is a thing of the past. You can now automatically export that data (as well as delete it more granularly, plus another fun thing we’ll get into in the next feature section) into an easily readable format like within a spreadsheet on whatever kind of schedule you’d like.
## New Action: Send Notification
In this release, we’ve also added a whole new action type, the first we’ve added in the product’s multi-year lifespan.
With the new Send Notification action, you can process any notification you’ve set up for a form and get more fine tuned control over a number of aspects related to it. Want to change the content of the notification based on certain value in an entry? You can override most notification settings directly in the task. Want to set a series of scheduled notifications that go out over a particular schedule after a user first submits a form (for example, an onboarding flow after purchasing something from a form), you can do that! And last but not least, the feature we’re most excited for as we’ve often seen people in the community request it…
Since tasks can now process Save and Continue draft submissions as mentioned above, and now that there is this new Send Notification action, you can set up scheduled reminder notifications on whatever schedule you’d like for your users who have saved but yet to resume the form via Save and Continue.
This is something previously totally unsupported in the Gravity Forms ecosystem from a ready-made product, to our knowledge, due to the added complexities of how Gravity Forms stores draft submissions versus actual full entries. Currently, in Gravity Forms, you’re limited to the default Save and Continue notification that is created when you activate the feature for a form, and that notification is a bit limited and the only default place where the save and continue related merge tags will be replaced properly. Now, with our new Send Notification action, you can have much more control over how and when your user is getting prompted to resume their submissions via email. You could even set up a series of emails using the same notification, use multiple Send Notification tasks, and override the notification’s content, subject, etc depending on which version of your task is running.
## Assorted bug fixes and enhancements you may not know you needed
With 5.0, we continue to implement minor quality of life fixes as well as our commitment to squashing customer reported bugs. This release contains a handful of additional changes that make things a bit easier for you as the user and us the developers supporting and iterating on the product. Peep the full changelog below for a full list of changes.
## Release Notes
- Added additional logging statements to the export email process.
- Added support for sending Notifications in a Task.
- Added support for targeting draft submissions in a Task.
- Updated the maximum attachment file size limit for export files to 10 MB.
- Updated version of a required dependency to fix conflicts with PHP <8.0.
- Fixed an issue where first run time would have GMT offset applied when saving Task.
- Fixed an issue where only the first 50 entries detected would be deleted when processing Task.
- Fixed an issue preventing exports including uploaded files from exporting to third party services.
- Fixed dates converting to UTC timezone in some scenarios.
- Fixed display only fields being available as Fields to Delete choices in Delete Entries tasks.
- Fixed Tasks not being scheduled using UTC time.
