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Form Prefill Options

   Journey Manager (JM) Previously known as Transact Manager (TM).  |    Platform Developer  |  v5.1 & Higher This feature is related to v5.1 and higher.

Manager offers a wide range of options to support form prefill when a form is first rendered to a user.

Form prefill can assist in providing an improved user experience and reducing data entry errors. A form’s data configuration can contain three kinds of mappings from prefill data. This will affect a form’s XML at render time:

Property prefill mappings: Client, Form, User properties.

Reuse information already stored within Manager.

  • User Data
  • Organizational data (Reuse across multiple forms)
  • Configure form specific properties without needing to customise/redeploy the form
  • Can be configured to sync/update the user properties maintained in TM

XML prefill mappings: External XML file containing prefill data.

It provides the following benefits:

  • Third party/external data
  • Can create mappings to a particular XML schema

Parameter prefill mappings: HTTP request parameters, session attributes or cookies.

Pros:

Data can be provided as part of the URL (simplicity)

Cons:

Difficult to map and provide complex data structures.

Extracts of Submission Data can also be configured via the Form Data Configuration.

A form’s data configuration can contain one or more of the following methods of prefill data mappings in a form’s XML data structure:

  • Property Prefill Mapping - properties for the form version are used for sourcing your data to prefill your form.
  • Input XML Prefill Mapping - An external XML file containing prefill data is obtained at the time that the form is rendered. This needs a prefill service to obtain the data values.
  • Request Param Prefill Mapping - prefill data is passed through as HTTP request parameters, session attributes or cookies.

Before a form is rendered and presented to form users, the various prefill methods are applied in the following order:

  1. Form XML data
  2. Property prefill - client forms
  3. Request parameters
  4. Property - user profiles

As a form can contain multiple prefill methods, it is important to understand the way this is handled in Manager. Where multiple mappings to the same form field exist, prefill data obtained at later stages overrides earlier obtained prefill data.

Next, learn about form property prefill mapping.