A form submission check fills in the fields you specify, submits the form, and confirms the response you expect. It is how you catch a contact form that accepts a submission and quietly does nothing with it.
What it does
- Opens the page with the form.
- Types your chosen value into each field.
- Clicks the submit button.
- Waits for the page to settle.
- Confirms the response, usually a thank-you message.
Why a form needs its own monitor
A broken form is the quietest failure a site has. The page loads, the fields work, the button submits, and the enquiry never arrives, because a plugin update broke the handler or the notification address bounced. Nothing about the page looks wrong.
The only way to know is to submit one and check what comes back.
Use a value you can recognise
Whatever you type gets submitted for real, every time the check runs. So:
- Put something in the fields that makes the submission obviously a test, for example a name like "Simrix Monitor check".
- Use an address you control for any email field, so the test submissions have somewhere to go.
- Expect the submissions to arrive on the monitor's schedule. A form check every 15 minutes generates a lot of them, so pick an interval you can live with.
Never put a secret in a form check
The value you type is stored in plain text as part of the monitor's configuration, and it can appear in the diagnostics generated when the step fails.
Do not use a form check on a sign-in form, and never enter a password, a card number or anything else you would not want recorded. To watch a sign-in page, use a page check that confirms the form is present instead.
What you can assert afterwards
The same assertions as any other monitor: that text is present or absent, that the title or address changed, or that an element now exists. The most useful is usually the text of the confirmation message.
If your form submits without changing the page, assert that the success element exists rather than that the address changed.