Prepopulating Forms via the URL
Logiforms provide a number of ways to help you record additional information from your web site visitors. The additional information is passed into your form and recorded. Generally, you will record the data into hidden fields. Below, we explain a couple of the options available:
You can pass values into your form to pre fill the form fields. This method is simple to use. Lets say you have a form on your web site at "http://www.yoursite.com/orderform.html" and your form contains a field name 'first_name'. You can pre populate the first_name field by calling your form like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/orderform.html?first_name=Bob
The code in bold, appended to the end of the url tells the form to populate the field first_name with the value Bob. Notice the "?" after the first part of the URL. This character signals that the remaining characters are values being passed to the page and not part of the actual URL. Additional values are separated by an "&" character as shown in this example:
http://www.yoursite.com/orderform.html?first_name=Bob&last_name=Jones&email_address=bob@yahoo.com
This method is easy to use and can help you track affiliates, set default form values and more. You can use this method in conjunction with autoresponder and notification rules to trigger a specific email based on a value you passed into the form. This enables you to use the same contact form on multiple web sites, but still separate the data collected and send the correct email response. You would pass in the web site name or a site ID, and your notification email would go to the correct party based on the "site name" field value. Outside the scope of this article is the ability to create filters and allow sub user access to your data, using these same flags you have set through this method.
You can also use this method in conjunction with dependencies in order to hide or show questions when the form is loaded.
Another popular use is when you send out an email campaign and have a link to your form in your email campaign. If you already know the users email address, name and other information, you don't need to ask them to enter it again and you can set those fields to hidden. Pass it through the url using the method described below to increase response rates by limiting the number of fields your users need to completed. If you are using the logiforms Email Campaign Manager, you would create a link like the one below by using wildcards values:
http://www.yoursite.com/quicksurvey.html?first_name=[first_name]&last_name=[last_name]&email_address=[email_address]
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