Pre-fill form details with hidden fields

Hidden fields are awesome! They help you ensure your customer details are accurate and reduce the number of questions required in a form. Hidden or pre-filled fields allow you to use information you already have to stop your customers creating duplicate profiles. For example, your customer might use their work email address in a form, rather than the personal email address they used when originally purchasing, creating a new profile.

How it works

When you add a hidden field you’re pre-filling questions with information you’ve already collected, for example email. It’s done by appending a parameter to the URL sent to your customer, for example [.code]www.form.com/1234/?email=XXXX[.code]. 

If you hide multiple questions, these will be separated by “&”. For example you might have a form URL that looks like this…

How to add a hidden field

Navigate to Forms Manage > Forms. 

1. Create a new form or click on the form you want to edit. 
2. Click on the Build tab. 
3. Find the question you want to hide, or scroll down to the bottom of the form and click on “Add a block” to add a new question. 
4. Click on Logic & Validation.

5. Under the Hidden field click Hide this question to turn this feature on (it will turn teal).

As a final step, you can customize the URL that will be displayed for your customers. For example, if you are hiding the email field, you could call this “email”. This will result in a URL with [.code]email=XXXX[.code] appended to the end of it. 

6. To change what is displayed in the URL, adjust the URL name field. Please make sure these are kept as short as possible (20 character max) and remember, you can only use letters, numbers, and underscores. 

Any questions that have been hidden will now have an icon next to the question type as shown in the screenshot below.

What types of information can be pre-filled with Hidden fields? 

The following question types can be configured as hidden fields:

• Date
• Email 
• First name
• Last name
• Long text
• Multiple choice
• Number
• Short text

That’s a wrap!

Hidden fields help you to reduce customer effort, and eliminate duplication of profiles, all while maximizing the efficiency of your data collection process. If you would like any help, reach out via the chatbot in the bottom right hand side of the page. We have heaps more content that showcases Lexer's Form Builder. You can see the full list of Forms content here.