Webforms are rarely static. As business requirements evolve, forms change too—fields are added or removed, validation rules are updated, questions are restructured, and submission workflows evolve. But what happens to the data that was collected using an earlier version of the form?
This session explores the challenges of building revision-aware Webforms in Drupal, where form definitions and submissions need to evolve without losing historical context or data integrity.
Using a fictional real-world scenario, we will follow a Webform through multiple revisions and examine what happens when existing submissions meet a changed form. The session will explore how to reason about form revisions, submission history, backward compatibility, editing older submissions, and changes to Webform elements.
Rather than focusing only on enabling revisions, the session will look at the architectural and implementation decisions required to make revisions meaningful in a real application—including how to associate submissions with the appropriate form context, handle changes between revisions, and design for edge cases.
The goal is to provide Drupal developers and architects with practical patterns and considerations for building Webform solutions that can safely evolve over time.