I have to figure out a rather unpleasant and boring thing. I am, however, learning some fairly odd and interesting tricks as a result. This is one that might be useful to someone.
Google Forms
You can pre-fill Google form entries with a URL. That might be useful if you had 720 students in groups of 6 reviewing one another but didn’t want to build a form with 720 student names or build a 120 forms with 6 student names. I don’t think I’m going to end up using this for this purpose1 but maybe it’ll prove useful to someone else and it’s dead simple.
Step one – Build your form.
Step two – Go to Responses in the Form Editor view and select “Get pre-filled URL”. You then fill out the form the way you want and it creates the URL.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In this case, I’m filling out a multiple choice question and a free form text entry.
Now, you might wonder what would happen if in the URL you set a multiple choice answer to something not available as an option- like ‘Freddy Kruger’ for the first field in the form. I wondered that. It just comes up blank in the spreadsheet.2 Sadly, as I mucked around I couldn’t come up with a decent way to hide the field from the user or make it un-editable. I did attempt pulling out the form HTML and putting it in my own container so I could hide elements via CSS but I didn’t find any URL combination that would work for me.
Gravity Forms
Turns out you can do this pretty easily in Gravity Forms.
Step one – build your form
Step two – decide which pieces you want populated via URL
Step three – for each element you want populated this way, go to the Advanced tab and check the box labeled “Allow field to be populated dynamically” and name your variable. I named mine stud_name. You can see that in the image below and in the URL below that.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So this URL
http://rampages.us/playground/2014/10/17/populate-via-url/?stud_name=Ivan%20the%20Terrible
will populate the student field with the name Ivan the Terrible.3 If I made the field visible to admin only (like I did with the the professor field in this example), it will still populate but the user won’t see the field at all.
