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Exporting entries with Gravity Forms is easy, and one of the more common requests we get is how to export Nested Form entries. Keeping your form entry data organized and accessible has always been a key part of Nested Forms, and we baked that right into form exports. In this tutorial we’ll walk through the different options when exporting your Parent and Child forms.
Let’s get started.
Overview
In this example, we’re going to look at the form entries for a registration form for in-store gaming events. A user fills out some basic date and time info at the top of the form, adds participants into a Nested Form, and decides on refreshments. Costs associated with the size of the party and refreshments is automatically calculated, and when the customer submits the form they are registered for the event.
Exports with Nested Forms
Exporting your form entries with Nested Forms is similar to exporting form entries for any form. Navigate to Forms > Import / Export and select your form from the drop down. Gravity Forms will show every available field for export, and if the form contains a Nested Form field it will show the Nested Form Field and the child fields.
Nested Form Fields
Before we get started with the export, let’s first talk about how Nested Form Fields export and what each of the options gives us.
In my Parent form, I have a Nested Form Field called “Party Members”.
On the Export page, this field is available as an exportable field.
With that option checked, this is what is exported into our CSV file.
The numbers that display here are the Entry IDs for each Nested Form entry. Numbers on the same row belong to a single Parent entry. This is useful information, but depending on why I’m exporting my form I might want to omit it.
Child Form Fields
Along with the Nested Form Field, I can also export the Child Form Fields.
When these fields are checked, my CSV displays the child field entries as separate columns.
Each block represents child entries that belong to a single Parent entry.
Putting It Together
With that out of the way, let’s get back to exporting the entries for my game night. In my case, I want to export every field from the Parent form and also the child form fields from the Nested Form, but I don’t want to export the Nested Form field—the Entry IDs aren’t import to me for this export.
The export file that I get with these settings is a nice combination of the Parent and Child form values.
Now that’s a good-looking export file!
Taking It Further
For those curious about how my form is handling the registration calculations, it’s a combination of the :count merge tag modifier and GF Copy Cat.
There’s a Number field in the Parent form called “Party Count” that uses a merge tag to calculate the number of child form entries.
That same field then uses GF Copy Cat to automatically copy its value into the quantity sub-field of a Product field.
This is same method you see in practice in the GF Nested Forms demo.
Questions? Comments?
Was this tutorial useful? Do you have questions about Nested Forms exports? Do you want us to invite us to your D&D game nights? We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below!
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Hi there,
Some people have already rised the issue of exporting parent form with child form field, where the child form uses one line for each entry, below the parent form line…
This totally kill any possibility to manipulate the exported table.
One solution could be to place parent field values in some hidden child form field and export the child form rather than the parent one
One other could be to export the parent form, with the child entry field as new columns. If my parent form has three field plus the child form (that has two fields), then the column A,B, C would be for the parent form, and then E and F for the first child entry, G and H for the second, etc.
I think the best would be to have both option to fit any uses cases
Regards
Hi JJ,
Thanks for the feedback about this feature. We’ll ping our devs about it.
If you have an active Gravity Perks License, you can get in touch with us via our support form with your account email address and we’ll be happy to dig into this further.
Best,
Is it possible for this to work with approveme.com’s e-signature software? The client requires legally binding signatures from several forms for each applicant, and doesn’t like receiving their forms all piece-meal. Once the form is completed, they’re directed to another page for the legally binding signature with the information from the form brought over (line by line by the ID of each field). Does this sound as though nested forms would work in this situation? Thanks,
Hi Rochelle,
This looks like a question that will require some digging.
If you have an active Gravity Perks License, can you please get in touch with us via our support form with your account email address so we can assist you further.
Best,
Is there a way to embed the nested form data into a GravityPDF document?
Hi Mike,
You can check out this article found here on how to display the Nested Forms table within GravityPDF.
I hope this helps.
Best,
Hi great job on the plugin! When trying to integrate Zapier, It’s only showing the entry id of the child form not the values.
Is there anyway to get the exact values of the child form together with the parent values?
Thank you!
Hello, The feeds for a nested form and parent form process independently, but they process at the same time. We don’t have a way to include child data in the parent form feed; however, most folks import the parent entry data as a row via one zap and then create a new row for each child entry via a second zap configured for the child form. If you haven’t created zaps for Gravity Forms, there’s a great tutorial available here:
https://docs.gravityforms.com/setting-up-your-zapier-zap/
is it possible for the child export to contain a field from the parent form?
im trying to make a product order parent form and the nested forms are product categories
im automatically exporting this to google sheets with a plugin
I have one sheet for the parent form which is essentially the order information
and another sheet which is a list of all of the products in the orders, and I would like to include the name of the client on this sheet but I would need to reference the parent form, I know I can include the parent entry ID but the name would be more practical
thanks !
I second this feedback. Having an export option where the child entries are separate rows and the parent data is repeated as needed would save us a lot of manual copy-pasting before importing the data into our registration software.
Nested forms are great, but the export is still troublesome. What if I wanted to sort the party attendees by alignment? That would mess up my list and I would nor be able to determine, for example, their party name.
You should include an export option to write the information from the parent form on each row of the child form entries. That would solve the problem that, if working with large lists and large events, is non trivial.
Hi Adam, thanks for the feedback. If you want to add a little weight to this feature request, submit it via our support form. The more customers who request a feature, the higher it is prioritized. 🙂