Prefilling a form element from a link

[BasilC]

I'm creating a form for members of an organisation to provide some data to go into a completely new table. It would be useful if one of the fields in the new table could be the id from the main membership table - but I don't want the members to be directly updating the main table.

What I have in mind would be tacking ?pers_id='{u3a_people___id}' or something similar onto the end of a link to the new form that I'll send out using a list email plugin.

So the questions are:

1. How would I pass the id in the link?
2. Can I use a SEF url?
3. How would I populate the pers_id element in the table with the value from the url?

Just to emphasize that the members will be creating new records in the new table, not accessing existing records.

 

[cheesegrits]

1) Just make your 'pers_id' be the full element name on the new table ... ?newtable___per_id={u3a_people___id}

Although you may have to append _raw to both names, to make sure you get the value, not the label.

You can test it by just appending that to the URL when loading a new form for that list.

2) Depends what you mean ... if you mean can you append that query string to a SEFed URL, then yes, usual query string rules apply ... ? separates URL from query string, & separates individual query string args, so if it's a SEF'ed URL with no query string args use ?.

If you mean can you create a SEFed URL that incorporates your variable, like /per_id/123, rather than using a query string, then no.

3) It happens automagically when you set an element name on the URL to a new form ... as long as the user has ACL access to the element. You can set the value of any element on a new form with &tablename___elementname=whatever

-- hugh

 

[BasilC]

Thanks Hugh, works perfectly!

I was referring to the first type of SEF url - a "person-friendly" URL with an appended query string.