How to Prevent Students from Deleting Materials They Uploaded to a Form

Reported Issue

A partner institution built a person-scoped form that lets prospective students request a faculty supervisor before they become applicants. Students upload their materials to the form, and a Deliver email to the requested faculty member uses those materials' GUIDs to link to each file.

After go-live, one student's earlier materials were overwritten instead of added to. The student submitted a request, created an application, then submitted a second request while logged in to the application system. Logged in, the student could delete the files from the first request and upload new ones. That changes which material GUIDs reach faculty whenever a student sends more than one request within a day.

The partner institution asked for either (a) log the student out of the application system when they open the form, or (b) block the deletion of materials uploaded for an earlier request.

What We Found

The Upload Materials widget has no built-in setting to turn off the "Delete" link, but custom CSS can hide it.

The ReSolution

We recommended hiding the link with the CSS rule in 🗑️ Hide "Delete" on Forms to Prevent Materials Deletion. See also Add JavaScript and CSS to Forms/Events the Easy Way for where the CSS goes. The partner institution added it to the live form and is monitoring the results.