Autodesk Forma Build Forms – Activity Log Captures Every Character Typed in Text Fields

[sudhakar]

I would like to raise a product improvement suggestion regarding the Forms tool in Autodesk Forma Build.

Currently, when users enter comments inside “Text Response” fields, the Activity panel appears to capture every intermediate text change while the user is typing. As a result, the activity history becomes populated with multiple incomplete entries for what is actually a single comment or review response.

For example, if a user types:

“Inspection completed with comments.”

the Activity panel may capture several partial updates such as:

• “Inspection”

• “Inspection completed”

• “Inspection completed with”

• and so on

instead of recording only the final submitted response.

This creates practical challenges on live construction projects, including:

• excessive and noisy audit trail history,

• reduced readability of activity logs,

• difficulty during QA/QC and consultant reviews,

• unnecessary activity events for minor draft changes,

• poor signal-to-noise ratio on large projects with heavy form usage.

I also noticed that Forms already provides useful draft behavior, such as auto-saving entered responses and allowing users to continue editing later. This is very helpful for real site workflows, where inspections or reviews may not always be completed in one sitting.

However, the activity tracking could be improved by separating draft-saving behavior from official activity logging.

Suggested improvement:

• Continue silently auto-saving draft responses in the background.

• Allow users to freely type, edit, pause, exit, and continue later.

• Do not generate Activity panel entries for every intermediate draft edit.

• Record the Activity entry only when the user intentionally clicks a “Submit”, “Apply Changes”, “Save Response”, or preferably “Submit Section” action.

A section-level submission approach may be more practical because, in real construction workflows, reviews, approvals, and resubmissions are often handled section-wise rather than question-by-question.

Proposed behavior:

• User completes or updates responses within a section.

• User clicks “Submit Section”.

• Activity panel records one clean, meaningful activity entry for that section submission/update.

This would create a clearer distinction between:

• ongoing draft work, and

• officially submitted review activity.

Expected benefits:

• cleaner and more professional audit trails,

• improved governance and review traceability,

• easier activity log interpretation,

• better usability for QA/QC, inspections, consultant reviews, and enterprise workflows,

• reduced unnecessary activity log clutter on large projects.

Autodesk may also consider offering configurable activity tracking options at the Form template level, such as:

• Detailed Field-Level Tracking Mode

• Section-Level Submission Mode

This enhancement would greatly improve the usability, audit quality, and enterprise readiness of Forms in Autodesk Forma Build.

Hope Autodesk product team can consider this enhancement in future updates.

[sudhakar]

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