How to Enable Prefill By URL Setting in WPForms

Introduction

Would you like to enable and use the Enable Prefill By URL setting on your WPForms? Using this setting, you can autofill form fields for a user by including values in the URL.

What is Enable Prefill By URL?

You can use this setting to populate some of your form fields from one form to another by pulling out information in the URL.

You can find a good example of that here in this article.

Enabling the Prefill By URL

To enable this option within a form, you’ll need to first open the form builder and go to Settings » General from within the form builder and click the Advanced tab. Toggle the option labeled Enable Prefill By URL to enable this.

Assembling the URL

Next, you’ll need to assemble a URL with a query string. The query string will use GET parameters to target a specific field and include the value for that field.

But it doesn’t matter what the field type is.  All query strings for the Enable Prefill By URL setting will follow the same general structure. As an example, here’s a URL with the basic query string structure you’d need:

http://test.com?wpf20_1_subfield=value

• ?wpf: Indicates the start of a query string for WPForms prefill by URL setting.
• Form ID: Targets a specific form (in the above URL, the Form ID is 20).
• Field ID: Targets a specific field within the form (in the above URL, the Field ID is 1).
• Subfield Identifier (Optional): Used only when targeting a subfield, such as the City subfield within an Address field (in the above URL, this is simply named “subfield”).
• = (Equals Sign): Indicates the start of the value.
• Value: The value you want to add/select for a field. Any spaces should be replaced with %20.

Next, we’ll take a look at some more specific examples and the query string formats you’ll need for various field types.

Populate Multiple Fields in the Same Form

If you’d like to populate more than one field with a single query string, you can include multiple parameters within your query string. For example:

?wpf111_1=text&wpf111_2=othertext

Populate Fields in Different Forms on the Same Page

If you were to have more than one form on the same page, you can combine parameters within a single query string. Such as this example:

?wpf111_1=text&wpf222_1=othertext

Using Conditional Logic with this setting

When using conditional logic, this will continue to work as expected even when using the prefill setting. What this means is that any conditional fields will hide/display based on any fields that have been auto-filled (conditional logic is applied after fields have been dynamically populated).

Query String Formats for Specific Fields

The table below shares more details and examples on how to set up GET parameters for each field type. If a field has different formatting options, specific examples for those are included as well.

Single Line Text

Paragraph

Dropdown

Multiple Choice

Checkboxes

Numbers

Name

Email

GDPR Agreement

Website / URL

Address

Password

Phone

Date / Time

Hidden

HTML

File Upload

Page Break

Section Divider

Rating

Captcha

Signature

Likert Scale

Net Promoter Score

Payment Coupon

Single Item

Multiple Items

Dropdown Items

Credit Card

Total

Using the prefill setting

In the tutorial link above, the idea is to have your visitor see the first form and complete some basic information. Then pass that information on to another form with the Submit button.

In order to achieve that, you’d need to set up your Confirmation Type to Go to URL (Redirect) and use this setting for the fields above to populate that query string.

An example is adding this URL to the Redirect URL. http://mydomain.com/contact?contact-reason=Events%20and%20Parties

And that’s it! For another specific example of this in action, check out this tutorial on How to Use Query Strings to Pre-Populate Form Fields From Another Form. For other examples, please check out our article on How to Use Query Strings to Auto-Fill a Text Field.

FAQ

Q: How do I use this for sublabels?

A: When using this to pre-populate a Name or Address field that could have several subfields, we’d like to share an example with you.

?wpf1036_1|first={field_id="1|first"}&wpf1036_1|last={field_id="1|last"}&wpf1036_3|address1={field_id="3|address1"}&wpf1036_3|address2={field_id="3|address2"}&wpf1036_3|city={field_id="3|city"}&wpf1036_3|state={field_id="3|state"}&wpf1036_3|postal={field_id="3|postal"}

Additional Links

• For details on how to locate a Form ID or Field ID, please see our tutorial.
• As a general rule, the maximum length for a URL is 2,000 characters.