Field Alias | Zoho Forms - User Guide

Field Alias - Prefill URL

What is prefilling form fields?

Prefilling form fields means automatically populating some or all of your form fields with data, making it easier and faster for the respondents to fill out your forms.
Prefill forms

Why is prefilling forms important?

  1. Prefilling forms can save users time and effort when filling out forms repeatedly. Prefilling a form with previously submitted information, for example, can make the process much faster and easier if a user is redirected to a new form on form submission and fills out a form that asks for some similar data.
  2. Prefilling forms can help in ensuring that the information submitted is accurate and consistent. For example, if a respondent's name and address are pre-filled, there is less room for typos or any other errors that may occur when manually filling out a form.
  3. Prefilling forms can improve the overall user experience by making the process of filling out a form more seamless, thereby reducing abandonment rates and increasing user satisfaction.

What is Field Alias?

Field alias is an alternate name that you can assign to identify your form fields. You can use this option to prefill fields for your respondents in the shared form.

Prefill fields using Field Alias

 

To do this,

  1. Provide alternate names (field aliases)  to the fields that you wish to prefill.

  2. Provide the values to be prefilled in your form corresponding to the field aliases and auto-generate the public URL of your form with appended  field aliases and their values to be prefilled.

Set Field Alias    

To assign an alternate name to your form field,

  1. In your form builder, navigate to Settings > PrefillField Alias - Prefill URL.
  2. Click Configure Now.



  3. Under Field Label, select the form fields you wish to assign alternate names for and enter their aliases in the corresponding text boxes under Field Alias.
  4. Click Save.

    Assign alternate

Generate a prefilled form URL 

You can use the alternate names (field aliases) assigned to the fields and prefill your form fields.
To do this,
  1. Click Generate Prefill URL under Prefill URL Builder as shown.

    Generate Prefill URL

  2. In the pop-up, assign the value to be prefilled for each field alias.

    Auto-generated Prefilled form URL

  3. You can also add tracking parameters, such as the Referrer Name to the URL by clicking + Tracking Parameters.

    With Tracking O
You will find the public URL of a prefilled form field at the bottom under GENERATED PREFILL URL , which you can readily use to share with your respondents.

Manually create the URL of a prefilled form

you must append the field alias and its value to the URL of your form. When the form is accessed, the fields appended to the URL will be prefilled in the form.
To prefill your form,
  1. After assigning field aliases to the fields that you wish to prefill in your form, access the public URL of your form under the  Share  tab.
  2. Append the field aliases and their values to your URL. To prefill more than one field, you must use an ampersand (  ) between the field values.
Notes Note: You need to copy the public URL of your form under the  Share  tab and append the field aliases to the URL manually. 

For example:    

If you are looking to prefill  Department  and  Organization  fields in your form with values '  Zylker  ' and '  Marketing  ', first assign the field aliases for 'Department' and 'Organization' fields respectively, say 'dept' and 'org'. Next, append ?dept=Marketing&org=Zylker  to the form URL as shown:

   https://forms.zohopublic.com/.../   ?dept=Marketing&org=Zylker

Prefill a Multiple Choice Field    

If you wish to prefill a multiple choice field (Multiple Choice, Checkbox), the choice values that are required to be prefilled in the form should be appended to the URL. 

Example:
If you have assigned the field alias name for the Multiple Choice field in your form as mc, the form URL should be appended with field alias and its choice value as shown:
https://forms.zohopublic.com/.../   ?mc=First Choice&mc=Third Choice

Prefill a Dropdown Field       

Without Grouped Choices

If you wish to prefill a dropdown field, the choice value to be prefilled in the form should be appended to the URL.

Example:

If you have assigned the field alias name for the Dropdown field in your form as dpd, the form URL should be appended with field alias and its choice value as shown:


With Grouped Choices

If you wish to prefill a dropdown field with grouped choices, you can choose to prefill the form with one of the choices in a group. For this to work, you must append both the choice value and the group name along with the field alias in the form URL.


Example
:
If you have set the field alias name for the Dropdown field in your form as  dpd,  where the Dropdown field has 2 groups, say Group1 and Group2 with 3 choices each.

Group1
   Choice1
Choice2
Choice3
Group2
   Choice1
Choice2
Choice3

  If you wish to prefill your form with Choice3 of Group 1, the URL should be as follows:

https://forms.zohopublic.com/..../   ?dpd=choice3&dpd_gc=Group1

Notes
Note: Use the same choice names in the URL as in your form.

Prefill Embedded Forms

If you have embedded your form on a website and wish to prefill the embedded form, append the field aliases and their values to your form's permalink URL within the embed code.  
For example:
<iframe frameborder="0" style="height:500px;width:99%;border:none;"  src='  https://forms.zoho.com/zylker/form/TravelRequestForm/formperma/1d2ld7jUoGDLINcnloYo2R_VOPJGeUSGtSq5WWDf3sc dept=Marketing > </iframe>


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