feat: Add confirmation email for form respondents by dtretyakov · Pull Request #3098 · nextcloud/forms

dtretyakov · 2025-12-17T21:36:48Z

Implements issue #525 - Send confirmation emails to form respondents after submission.

Features:

Add database migration for confirmation email settings (enabled, subject, body)
Add confirmation email fields to Form entity
Implement email sending with placeholder replacement:
- {formTitle}, {formDescription} placeholders
- Field name placeholders (e.g. {name}, {email})
- Automatic data overview if {data} not in template
Add UI in Settings sidebar to configure confirmation emails
Automatically detect email field from form submissions
Send email using system mail account

Technical changes:

Add sendConfirmationEmail() method to FormsService
Integrate email sending into notifyNewSubmission() flow
Add unit tests for confirmation email functionality
Update FormsService constructor with IMailer and AnswerMapper dependencies
Update documentation (DataStructure.md, CHANGELOG.en.md)

The feature requires at least one email-validated short text question in the form. Email sending failures are logged but don't break the submission process.

Chartman123 · 2025-12-18T08:32:22Z

@dtretyakov thanks for you contribution :) Please have a look at the failing checks and fix them :)

codecov · 2025-12-18T22:32:42Z

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 79.04762% with 22 lines in your changes missing coverage. Please review.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
lib/Migration/Version050202Date20251217203121.php	0.00%	20 Missing ⚠️
lib/Service/FormsService.php	97.53%	2 Missing ⚠️

📢 Thoughts on this report? Let us know!

dtretyakov · 2025-12-19T09:14:05Z

@Chartman123 done, it seems that approval is required to re-run remaining checks

dtretyakov · 2025-12-23T11:09:22Z

@Chartman123 the tests are green.

I’m not sure who could help reviewing that to proceed further.

Chartman123 · 2025-12-25T10:21:47Z

@dtretyakov I'll have a closer look in the next days :)

github-actions · 2026-01-01T02:17:17Z

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dtretyakov · 2026-01-14T13:30:25Z

@Chartman123 hopefully you are doing well.

Do you need an additional information to proceed further with the review?
Also if you're busy we could also invite another person to review the changes.

Chartman123 · 2026-01-14T13:36:17Z

@dtretyakov just being busy at the moment... the same applies to my co-maintainer. so just give us some more time. :)

Some questions: what do you do if there's more than one e-mail field? also no error checking in the frontend if there's none.

susnux

Looks quite clean but did not review properly yet.
Will do soon!

Chartman123 · 2026-01-26T10:04:51Z

Send email from form owner's email address

Please use the configured system mail account for sending the mails for privacy reasons, but also for making sure the mail gets sent at all. Most mailservers will check if the sender's address corresponds to the logged on user.

Chartman123 · 2026-01-26T21:12:08Z

Please don't use merge commits, just rebase your branch on main :)

dtretyakov · 2026-01-27T19:19:13Z

@Chartman123 thank you for the review. I rebased the changes on top of the main branch.

Some questions: what do you do if there's more than one e-mail field? also no error checking in the frontend if there's none.

Now we have the validation when no e-mail fields are present and multiple e-mail fields are available:

Please use the configured system mail account for sending the mails for privacy reasons, but also for making sure the mail gets sent at all. Most mailservers will check if the sender's address corresponds to the logged on user.

Done, now it uses system mail account

Implements issue nextcloud#525 - Send confirmation emails to form respondents after submission. Features: - Add database migration for confirmation email settings (enabled, subject, body) - Add confirmation email fields to Form entity - Implement email sending with placeholder replacement: - {formTitle}, {formDescription} placeholders - Field name placeholders (e.g. {name}, {email}) - Add UI in Settings sidebar to configure confirmation emails - Automatically detect email field from form submissions - Send email using system mail account Technical changes: - Add sendConfirmationEmail() method to FormsService - Integrate email sending into notifyNewSubmission() flow - Add unit tests for confirmation email functionality - Update FormsService constructor with IMailer and AnswerMapper dependencies - Update documentation (DataStructure.md, CHANGELOG.en.md) The feature requires at least one email-validated short text question in the form. Email sending failures are logged but don't break the submission process. Signed-off-by: Dmitry Tretyakov <dtretyakov@gmail.com>

dtretyakov · 2026-02-16T19:53:44Z

@susnux or @Chartman123 do you have any other ideas to address before the merge?

Chartman123 · 2026-02-21T15:42:43Z

@dtretyakov Could you please move your changes to a branch other than main in your fork? This makes it easier to check out your changes in my local dev environment

susnux

Overall this makes sense to me, but from experience with other tables like this it turned out that its not ideal for scaling.

The problem is that many things in the table are only used by few tables but cause huge size of the table like "submission message" or from this PR "confirmation mail body".

Its not a problem introduced with this PR - so we can also do this later!
But just for some feedback here cc @Chartman123

I wonder if we should first - or later - split the table to get some "forms metadata" or similar so that we can put data not needed for every action there.
That would reduce database select latency a lot for large instances (e.g. this information is only needed on edit or insert submit but not for the majority of requests which would just load the form for submitting.

susnux

So for the pull request itself I think it is quite nice! Good work :)

Just about the email field I am not sure if we should not better explicitly let the creator flag the input field to use.

susnux · 2026-02-21T20:08:24Z

lib/Service/FormsService.php

+			}
+
+			$emailValue = $answerMap[$questionId][0];
+			if ($this->mailer->validateMailAddress($emailValue)) {


Should rather use \OCP\Mail\IEmailValidator for validation

susnux · 2026-02-21T20:11:04Z

lib/Service/FormsService.php

+		// If no email found, cannot send confirmation
+		if (empty($recipientEmails)) {
+			$this->logger->debug('No valid email address found in submission for confirmation email', [
+				'formId' => $form->getId(),
+				'submissionId' => $submission->getId(),
+			]);
+			return;
+		}
+
+		if (count($recipientEmails) > 1) {
+			$this->logger->debug('Multiple email fields found in submission for confirmation email, using first match', [
+				'formId' => $form->getId(),
+				'submissionId' => $submission->getId(),
+				'emailCount' => count($recipientEmails),
+			]);
+		}


I am not sure if this is the best way to configure the mail.
I can imagine multiple valid scenarios where you ask for multiple e-mail addresses-

Maybe we can set a flag on such a question? So the form creator can configure which field to use?

Chartman123 · 2026-02-21T20:15:21Z

let the creator flag the input field to use.

Could be part of the extraSettings

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch from 9a52dba to fb9ef79 Compare December 18, 2025 22:19

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch 3 times, most recently from 52d72a9 to 3f94699 Compare December 19, 2025 08:48

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch 6 times, most recently from e61e929 to ec01c84 Compare December 20, 2025 12:06

github-actions bot added the feedback-requested label Jan 1, 2026

susnux reviewed Jan 18, 2026

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Chartman123 added enhancement New feature or request 2. developing Work in progress feature: 📝 submitting responses labels Jan 26, 2026

Chartman123 added this to the 5.3 milestone Jan 26, 2026

Chartman123 linked an issue Jan 26, 2026 that may be closed by this pull request

Confirmation mail for respondents #525

Open

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch from 1da474b to 831ea36 Compare January 27, 2026 19:00

dtretyakov closed this Jan 27, 2026

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch from 831ea36 to 58bd5ec Compare January 27, 2026 19:01

dtretyakov reopened this Jan 27, 2026

dtretyakov force-pushed the main branch from 8536070 to d19fe2e Compare January 29, 2026 20:11

susnux reviewed Feb 21, 2026

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