When you’ve created apps with the App Designer, they also act as databases to hold your collected data.
You can always return to the App Designer to make modifications to your original structure, even if you’ve already started collecting data. As long as you’re adding new fields or editing the field label and data name, your current data will be fine. See the notes below for a few actions that can result in data loss.
Here’s a list of changes you can make to your apps without affecting the associated data:
Change app name or description
Field labels, descriptions, data names
Field settings like required, hidden, read-only, default values
Validations and conditions can be changed
Adding new fields
Changing order of fields or moving fields in and out of sections (there are caveats to this with repeatable sections)
Record title settings
Notes
It is always a good idea to export your app’s data before modifying your app. This will give you a copy of the data. If there is any data loss, you can import the data back into the existing records and add the data that was removed back to the existing records.
If you have existing data in an app, or you import data, then add condition visibility rules that make some of the existing data conditionally hidden, the data will be cleared unless you select the 'preserve data in this field even when it's invisible' option.
You are free to move fields to another section or part of the app without issue. However, moving a field into, out of, or between repeatable sections will cause the attributes attributes already collected to likely be lost.
Removing a field from an app will likely result in any collected data in that field in existing records to be lost.
In order to replace a field type with a different field type (e.g. switching from a choice list field to a text field) and the original field contains data, you must export the data before deleting the existing field. After the changes have been made you can import the data back by updating existing records and making sure that the column is mapped to the new field. This is because Fulcrum treats some data types very differently, and not all data can be re-cast between formats.