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Set up pre-filled form fields

Make data collection run smoother in your form with pre-filled fields.


Have you set up your Coda form and would like to send the published link with pre-filled fields for certain responses? For example, maybe you are sharing a form regarding a specific project and want to be able to program this into the form field for responders.

For more information on how to generally set up forms in Coda, click here. To learn about sharing your form externally, click here. For creating pre-filled form fields, keep reading!

Within this article, you’ll find...

 

Pre-filling form fields

To pre-fill fields in your forms, you will update the published form link before you share it with responders.

First, make sure your form is published (you can learn more about that here) and then:

  1. Using https://coda.io/form/Generic-Form-Name as the URL example for your published form, add a ? at the end

  2. Indicate fields that should be pre-filled using the Column Name ➡️ using the image below we will choose “Project”

  3. After the column name, type =

  4. Add the designated value that you wish to pre-fill the field with ➡️ using the image below, let's select “Razor Crest”

  5. Please note the standard URL encoding for apostrophes and spaces, as column names and values need to be URI encoded

Completed your URL will look like:

https://coda.io/form/Generic-Form-Name?Project=Razor%20Crest


You can pre-fill multiple values (or pre-select multiple choices from a multi-select list) by separating the values with ampersands (&) in your URL. The following pre-fills both the Project name and the Sprint:

https://coda.io/form/Generic-Form-Name?Project=Razor%20Crest&Sprint=2021%201A

 

Pre-filling hidden form fields

Perhaps you want to add some information by default in your results table, but in columns that are hidden in your form. To do so:

  1. Navigate to your form options

  2. Select Publish

  3. Open the Privacy settings

  4. Toggle “Include hidden columns for URL parameters” to on

This will allow you to encode your URLs with parameters that are collected in hidden columns that people filling out your form would not see. From our earlier example, using “Source” to structure a URL sent via email to indicate the form was filled out via your email send (vs. via Slack or some other way of sharing).
 

A note on security & privacy:

Please respect your users’ security and privacy when encoding form URLs. Nothing sensitive should be encoded or collected via your URLs, as query parameters are logged all over the Internet. Forms found to be violating this stipulation may be disabled per Coda’s terms and conditions.

 

 

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