Dynamically call a different gravity form based on custom field in a post

Hi GF

I have a particular case where I need to assign a different Gravity Form to each post in a Wordpress query. We have added an "id" custom field to the backend which references the gravity form id.

What we need now is way to (via php code) call that gravity from but replace the form id with the custom field value.

This is the code we have tried:

<?php $formid = the_field('bid_form_id');
gravity_form($formid, false, false, false, '', false, 12); ?>

However we are receiving an invalid argument error.

Is this possible and if so, how would be go about implementing it?

When I echo out the $formid - I get the correct value of the form ie. 12.

I am using the advanced custom fields plugin to generate the custom fields. The method for calling these fields is to use "the_field('field_name')