How to pre-populate fields in AidaForm Expert Accounts

If your form has pre-populated fields, it means that:

When your respondents open the form, some of the fields on the form may already have default answers in them. For example, it can have a default number, date or rating. Your respondents can change or keep the default answers. If a respondent submits your form without changing the pre-populated answers, the answers will be included in their response data. See a sample form
Important: if you want to add example text to your input field that disappears when respondents type, use the placeholder text instead. You can change the Placeholder in the field settings area.
Some fields of the form may be pre-filled with information that is relevant only to the person who opens your form. For example, the Email or Name fields on the form may display the related client information. This approach is useful when you do marketing campaigns, have a client database and use a marketing automation service or software. See a sample form

AidaForm allows you to pre-populate the following fields on your form: Date, Rating, Slider, Scale, Name, Dropdown, Email, Number, and Short Text.

What do the URLs of the pre-populated forms look like

By default, every form created in the AidaForm service gets a URL like https://YourSubdomain.aidaform.com/YourPath

To pre-populate a field on your form, you need to add a parameter to the end of the generated URL that starts with ?Field-ID=xxxx , where Field-ID is the unique field identifier and xxx is the data that will be entered into the field.

Example 1:
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/rating-pre-populate?9f1fd695-76a6-4f32-ad0f-4566befc5bff=4 Opens the form with the Rating field that is pre-filled with a four-star rating.

Example 2:
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/rating-name-pre-populate?9f1fd695-76a6-4f32-ad0f-4566befc5bff=5&de275b8f-c24a-4819-9965-ef8b410ec27d.1=John&de275b8f-c24a-4819-9965-ef8b410ec27d.2=Doe Opens the form that is prefilled with a five-star rating and the client name.

How to use the pre-populate feature in AidaForm

Step 1:
Create and publish a form. Copy the form URL and paste it in any text editor.

Step 2:
Important! Go to the Builder -> Set Up -> Traits section and turn ON the Allow Pre-population trait. If you don’t turn the setting ON, your form will not pre-populate fields even when you create a correct URL.

Step 3:
Open the Setting panel of the field that you want to pre-fill, scroll until the end to see the Field-ID line and click the Copy icon to copy the field identifier.

Step 4:
Open the text editor and add the copied identifier to the end of the form URL using the ? connector. Then add = and type the value that will be displayed in the pre-filled field. See the examples above of what your URL may look like.

Step 5:
Add as many parameters for your fields as you need using the & connector.

The tables below will help you correctly add parameters to pre-populate supported fields:

Date: you need to use the format yyyy-mm-dd to set up a date. The format the date will actually be displayed in depends on your respondent’s system setting.

Parameter example: ?field-id=2021-01-31
URL example: https://helpforms.aidaform.com/date-pre-populate?9947bf89-2a3b-4f42-b586-4f071408f063=2022-02-28
Name: the field consists of two parts, that’s why you need to use the same field identifier twice and add .1 and .2 to the corresponding parts. Use a variable (or MERGE tag) from your CRM or marketing automation tool to pre-populate the field with a customer-related value. In the example below, we pre-populate the field with the name John Doe.

Parameter example: ?field-id.1=John&field-id.2=Doe
URL example: https://helpforms.aidaform.com/name-pre-populate?de275b8f-c24a-4819-9965-ef8b410ec27d.1=John&de275b8f-c24a-4819-9965-ef8b410ec27d.2=Doe
Rating / Scale / Slider: use the values from 1 to 10 for Rating, from 1 to 11 for Scale and from 0 to 100 for Slider.

Parameter example: ?field-id=3
URL examples:
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/rating-pre-populate?9f1fd695-76a6-4f32-ad0f-4566befc5bff=4
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/scale-pre-populate?7208645d-ee09-4223-8880-730f7be1e4ae=5
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/slider-pre-populate?3b4dcde0-ee46-4fb5-9116-7c43efdf5df5=80
Number: you can add any figure you need.

Parameter example: ?field-id=3
URL example: https://helpforms.aidaform.com/number-pre-populate?76a5a3c0-ca76-4573-9205-db2ea573c86c=100
Dropdown / Short Text: you need to enter the value in the URL-encoded format. You can use any URL encoding service you may find on the internet, we have used https://www.urlencoder.org/. The examples below pre-populate the fields with the text “I don’t have any special preferences.”

Parameter example: ?field-id=I%20don%E2%80%99t%20have%20any%20special%20preferences
URL examples:
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/dropdown-pre-populate?8805ec61-5622-4cbe-b46c-931ed49ad8c5=No%20special%20preferences
https://helpforms.aidaform.com/short-text-pre-populat?3791d4da-bb65-47fb-8b20-ee4503504117=I%20don%E2%80%99t%20have%20any%20special%20preferences
Email: you need to enter the email in the URL-encoded format. You can use any URL encoding service you may find on the internet, we have used https://www.urlencoder.org/. Use a variable (or MERGE tag) from your CRM or marketing automation tool to pre-populate the field with a customer related value. The example below pre-populates the form with the email john.doe@email.com

Parameter example: ?field-id=john.doe%40email.com
URL example: https://helpforms.aidaform.com/email-pre-populate?55ef135a-84c5-42c3-945b-10a70bcb936f=john.doe%40email.com