Live form monitoring

What is Live Draft Saving

When Live Draft Saving (LDS) is enabled on a form, ContactFire saves the visitor's answers to the server as they type. If the visitor closes the tab or navigates away without submitting, you still receive their partial data.

Enable live draft saving

LDS is controlled per-form in Form Studio:

1. Open your form in Form Studio
2. Click Settings
3. Toggle Live Draft Saving on
4. Click Save

LDS is off by default. Enable it only for forms where the drop-off data is valuable, since it does store partial visitor data on the server.

How it works

Live tab in your inbox

Your dashboard inbox has a Live tab that shows all partial submissions for forms with LDS enabled. Each entry shows:

• Fields filled in so far
• Last activity timestamp
• Whether the draft was eventually submitted or abandoned

Submitted drafts move from the Live tab to your main inbox automatically.

Draft resume flow

When a visitor returns to the same form on the same browser, the embed script:

1. Reads the stored sessionId from localStorage
2. Calls GET /api/public/forms/{formId}/partial?sessionId=...
3. Pre-fills all previously saved fields
4. Picks up from where the visitor left off

The sessionId is per-form and per-browser. A visitor on a different device starts a fresh session.

Partial submission API

Use the API directly if you are building a custom frontend:

// Save a partial (first save — no sessionId yet)
const res = await fetch(
  'https://my.contactfire.com/api/public/forms/YOUR_FORM_ID/partial',
  {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'x-embed-token': 'cf_embed_your_token',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      data: { name: 'Alice', email: '[email protected]' },
    }),
  }
);

const { sessionId } = await res.json();
localStorage.setItem('cf_session_YOUR_FORM_ID', sessionId);

// Update an existing draft (subsequent saves — pass sessionId)
const sessionId = localStorage.getItem('cf_session_YOUR_FORM_ID');

await fetch(
  'https://my.contactfire.com/api/public/forms/YOUR_FORM_ID/partial',
  {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'x-embed-token': 'cf_embed_your_token',
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
      sessionId,
      data: { name: 'Alice', email: '[email protected]', message: 'Hello' },
    }),
  }
);

// Resume a draft — pre-fill the form on page load
const sessionId = localStorage.getItem('cf_session_YOUR_FORM_ID');
if (sessionId) {
  const res = await fetch(
    `https://my.contactfire.com/api/public/forms/YOUR_FORM_ID/partial?sessionId=${sessionId}`,
    {
      headers: { 'x-embed-token': 'cf_embed_your_token' },
    }
  );
  if (res.ok) {
    const { data } = await res.json();
    // data = { name: 'Alice', email: '[email protected]', ... }
    // pre-fill your form fields from `data`
  }
}

Idle notifications

When a draft has not been updated for 10 minutes, ContactFire sends an email notification so you can follow up. The notification includes the full partial data saved so far.

Common mistakes

These mistakes show up in almost every custom LDS integration. Check each one before shipping.