How To: Initiate SMS Messages

Megan Jackson

Forms On Fire has so many dynamic features! One of these is allowing a mobile user to initiate SMS messages directly from the mobile app. Today we’re going to build a mobile app together that initiates SMS messages dynamically.

First log into the cloud dashboard. If you don’t have access to the cloud dashboard, start a free 14-day trial with Forms On Fire here.

Navigate to Screens and click on the Add New button. Once you’re in the drag-and-drop form designer we’re going to add just two fields, a text and user field.

You can label and format your fields to however you want. I would recommend having the text field format be “Local Phone” to make inputting the phone number easier on the mobile user, as the numeric keyboard will first appear. On the user field properties, choose “Create SMS To” from the user interaction drop down. In the text box that appears now under user interaction put in the dataname of your phone number field. It will look something like this: