Resending Submissions [Update]
Context
There are times when we may want to resend successful submissions, for instance if they were lost through user error or the destination inbox was full etc.
Note: Processed submissions are held encrypted in the submission database for 28 days.
Options available to resend:
Rake task to a new desitation, this is a bulk resend of all successful submissions via email for a the one service between a date range and a new email address.
Manual, time consuming. Need to find the correct submission from all the submisisons in the live-production database.
How to use the rake task
There is a rake task to resend successful submissions for a given form, between given dates, to a new destiation email address.
rake replay_submission:successful_batch[date_from, date_to, service_slug, new_destination]
Date from and to will need to be strings that can be parsed using DateTime, the easiest way to generate them is to use irb and use DateTime and to_s.
The service slug will be necessary to find the submissions, you can check what it should be using the service configurations.
The destination email is necessary because resending submissions to the same email address will result in the destination email server discarding them as duplicates.
Attachments will be sent if present
Confirmation email actions will be removed from the submission before resending, to avoid duplication
JSON and ms list actions won’t be replayed, the utility is capable of doing so but at the time of writing the rake task defaults to skipping them. If you want to resend to JSON or ms list only, you’ll want to consider adding a rake task to do that.
Other considerations
The utility will create a new job for each submission found in the date range, depending on how many submissions you expect this to be it may be worth breaking up into smaller date ranges to avoid processing large numbers all at once, but given it uses the delayed job queue it can handle quite a lot at once and will just work its way through them.
We only keep submissions for 28 days, so any missed submissions odler than that are not recoverable.
The retry uses a JWT skew overide of 28 days, so no submissions should need to be replayed, but occasionally some of those missed submissions with attachments will get 404 responses when downloading the attachments, you can replay failed jobs from the batch as normal using the runbook.
Maunally Resending
Gain access to a submitter-api pod
Use the rails console
bundle exec rails c
Check delayed submissions first
It may be missing as it is delayed.
Find the processed Submissions
Grab all the submissions for the form at around the time stamp
submissions = Submission.where(service_slug: 'name_of_the _form').where("created_at > '2026-06-30 12:00:00 UTC' and created_at < '2026-06-30 17:00:00 UTC' ").order(created_at: :asc)
Note: BST is 1 hour behind UTC
Output data
submissions.map{|s| s.decrypted_submission["meta"]}
You can pinpoint different fields in the form expanding the metadata i.e. list of Reference numbers
submissions.map{|s| s.decrypted_submission["meta"]["reference_number"] if s.decrypted_submission["meta"]}.compact.to_json
Find the submission_id, note the submission_id and follow replay submission runbook.
Note: Dont forget to skew if there are attachment payloads
Note: The task will replay everything – even the email back to the user, api , and list posts