Share dialog implies it shares the form with Nextcloud users, but manages the public link

Summary

The Share dialog is titled "Share form" and contains two user/group pickers, but it does not share a form with other Nextcloud users — it manages the public response link. This misleads users into thinking they are granting colleagues access to the form.

Reported by a user setting up a new Nextcloud for a nonprofit, who reasonably assumed the picker inside "Share form" was how you share a form with your team. They initially thought they had misconfigured something. They had not — our documentation described it incorrectly too.

The documentation is now fixed (0964d44, EN + NL, unreleased). The UI that caused the confusion is unchanged, so the next user will hit exactly the same wall.

Background: how sharing actually works

FormVox is file-based. Every form is a .fvform file in Files, so a form is shared through the regular Nextcloud sharing sidebar, with the normal permission model. This is a deliberate design choice and we intend to keep it — it means forms inherit Nextcloud's permissions, visibility and policies for free, rather than FormVox maintaining a parallel sharing system.

The problem is not the model. It is that the UI never says so.

What is misleading

Location	Current text	Why it misleads
src/components/ShareDialog.vue:4	Share form	Promises sharing, delivers a link
src/components/ShareDialog.vue:7	Share this form with others to collect responses.	The second half corrects the first, but is read later
src/components/ShareDialog.vue:247	Restrict to specific users/groups	Main cause. A user/group picker inside a "Share" dialog reads as sharing
src/components/ShareDialog.vue:252	Only selected users and group members can access this form.	"can access this form" confirms the wrong reading

The dialog contains no reference to Files at all. A user who opens it asking "how do I share this with a colleague" is never told where that actually happens.

What already exists

src/components/SettingsPanel.vue:22-26 already has a "Manage sharing" button that opens the real Nextcloud sharing sidebar, with the permission roles explained above it. The implementation (openNativeShareDialog, lines 58-79) tries OCA.Files.Sidebar and falls back to a redirect into Files.

That is exactly what the reporter was looking for. It just lives in the settings panel, while the button labelled Share goes somewhere else.

So this is a labelling and navigation problem, not missing functionality.

Proposed changes

1. Rename the dialog

• ShareDialog.vue:4 — Share form → Response link
• ShareDialog.vue:7 → Create a link so people can respond. To give colleagues access to the form itself, use Sharing.

Resolves the misunderstanding on the first line the user reads.

2. Add a route to Files inside the dialog

A line at the top of the dialog:

Looking to share with Nextcloud users? → Manage sharing

Reuses openNativeShareDialog from SettingsPanel.vue. That function would move out of the component into e.g. src/utils/sharing.js so both callers can use it.

3. Reword the restriction picker

• ShareDialog.vue:247 — Restrict to specific users/groups → Limit who may submit
• ShareDialog.vue:252 → This only restricts the response link. It does not give these people access to the form — for that, use Sharing.

The Notify on new responses picker (line 100) stays as is; that label is already unambiguous.

Explicitly out of scope

Building a picker-and-Submit sharing flow inside FormVox (select users → one button → they get a notification), which is what the reporter originally asked for.

Nextcloud has no generic share API for non-file objects — IShareProvider is typed against Node/Folder. Every app that wants this builds its own share table, picker, "shared with me" query and notification path. That gap has been on the server backlog since nextcloud/server#7315 (2017). nextcloud/forms did build it, and it took five years (nextcloud/forms#576, #563 in 2020 → #322 completed 2025-08-13).

Adding a second sharing system alongside the file share would mean two ways to share the same form that disagree with each other.

Nextcloud is now solving this at the platform level: nextcloud/server#51803 "Unified sharing across apps", milestone Nextcloud 35, with the bulk merged in PR nextcloud/server#62241 (2026-07-20). The API currently lives in the NCU\Sharing unstable namespace and is marked @experimental, so no timeline is promised — but that is the mechanism FormVox should adopt when it stabilises, rather than inventing its own.

Scope

Files touched	ShareDialog.vue, SettingsPanel.vue, new helper in src/utils/
Translation strings	3 changed, 1 new
Data model / API	no change
Migration	none
Risk	low — no behaviour change, only naming and navigation

Open questions

1. Is Response link the right name? The dialog does more than the link alone (QR, embed, webhooks, response limit). Alternatives: Publish, Collect responses.
2. Where should openNativeShareDialog live now that two components use it? src/utils/ currently holds l10n.js and odt-export.js.
3. Should the editor's empty state also point at Files? A user who has never shared anything is never shown that sharing lives there.

Start with src/components/ShareDialog.vue and src/components/SettingsPanel.vue, especially the listed labels and openNativeShareDialog implementation. Decide where the shared helper belongs, then verify the dialog distinguishes response-link restrictions from form access and that Manage sharing opens the native Nextcloud sharing sidebar.