Form Prefill Options

   Journey Manager (JM) The transaction engine for the platform.  |    Platform Developer  |  All versions This feature is related to all versions.

Manager offers several options to prefill a form with some data, including applicant data, when the form is rendered to the applicant. Form prefill is a great way to significantly improve user experience and reduce data entry errors. You need to configure or map form’s data with prefill data, which will affect a form’s XML at render time. The form prefill is a flexible tool that allows you to implement various customer requirements. You can even mask some certain fields, such as a date of birth, phone number or address, on a form resume to improve application security.

Manager distinguishes the following mappings:

• Property prefill
• Input XML prefill
• Request parameter prefill

Let's look at each mapping in details:

Property Prefill Mapping

You can use properties defined for an organizations, form versions, or user profiles using property scopes. The scope can be one of the following:

• Client: a property configured for an organization and its forms, so it obtains its value dynamically from an organization.
• Form: a property configured for form versions, so it obtains its value directly or dynamically from a form version. This property can override Client's scope property.
• User: a property configured for user profiles, so it obtains the value from a user’s profile of a logged user.

This allows you to reuse data that is already stored in Manager:

• User data
• Organizational data - reuse across multiple forms
• Configure form specific properties without needing to customize or redeploy the form
• Can be configured to sync or update the user properties maintained in Manager

For more information, see form property prefill mapping.

Input XML Prefill Mapping

You can use an external XML file containing data, which is obtained at the time a form is rendered, that will be used to prefill a form. This provides the following benefits:

• Use 3rd-party and external data.
• Create mappings for a particular XML schema.

However, this method requires a prefill service to fetch data. For more information, see form input XML prefill mapping.

Request Parameter Prefill Mapping

You can use data passed in as HTTP request parameters, session attributes or cookies. This has the following advantages and disadvantages:

• Pros: Simplicity - data can be provided as part of an URL.
• Cons: Difficulty - create and map complex data structures can be daunting.

For more information, see form request parameter prefill mapping.

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 may use 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.