Form Availability

Registration opens Monday. The workshop seats forty. The survey closes at the end of the quarter. Each of those is a rule about when a form accepts answers, and each one otherwise becomes a calendar reminder to go and edit the config by hand.

availability states the rule once and lets the server enforce it:

forms:
  - id: 1
    name: workshop-signup
    title: Spring Workshop
    submitTo: { table: registrations }
    availability:
      opensAt: '2026-03-01T09:00:00Z'
      closesAt: '2026-03-20T23:59:59Z'
      maxSubmissions: 40
    fields:
      - { kind: table-field, column: email, required: true }

Availability Properties

Every property is optional. Omit the block and the form is open, forever, with no cap.

Property	Description	Default
opensAt	ISO 8601 timestamp at which the form starts accepting submissions.	Open immediately.
closesAt	ISO 8601 timestamp at which it stops.	Never closes.
maxSubmissions	Positive integer cap. The submission after the cap is refused.	Unlimited.
closedPage	Custom page shown while the form is closed, for any of the three reasons.	Title + boilerplate copy.

When both timestamps are set, opensAt must be strictly before closesAt. A window that closes before it opens accepts nothing and is almost always a typo, so it fails when the config is decoded, naming the form and both timestamps.

What a Closed Form Answers

Opening a closed form is not an error — the visitor gets a page explaining the situation. Posting to one is refused with a structured body so a programmatic client can tell the three cases apart.

State	GET /forms/{name}	POST status	Error body
Before opensAt	Closed page	403	{ error: 'form not yet open', opensAt }
After closesAt	Closed page	403	{ error: 'form closed', closedAt }
At maxSubmissions	Form still renders	403	{ error: 'submission limit reached', maxSubmissions, currentCount }

A refused submission writes nothing — no ledger row, no table row, no automation run.

The Closed Page

Left unconfigured, the closed page shows the form's own title and a sentence explaining that it is not yet open (quoting opensAt) or no longer accepting answers. closedPage replaces that with your own copy and, optionally, a way forward:

availability:
  closesAt: '2026-03-20T23:59:59Z'
  closedPage:
    title: Registration has closed
    message: Spring places are full. The autumn cohort opens in July.
    cta:
      label: Join the waiting list
      href: /waiting-list

Property	Description	Default
title	Page heading.	The form's title.
message	Body copy.	Default explanation for the reason.
cta.label	Link text. Requires cta.href.	No link.
cta.href	Link target. Requires cta.label.	No link.
type	Reserved discriminator; only page is accepted.	page

The same page serves all three closed states, so write copy that reads sensibly whether the form has not opened yet or has filled up.

Related Pages

• Anti-Spam & Attribution — the spam classification that is excluded from the cap.
• Access Control — the other reason a form may refuse a submitter.
• Submissions — the ledger status a refused submission does not create.
• Forms Overview — where availability sits in the full form schema.