Web Services has added web parameter passing to the Form and Survey building tools.
How this works:
1) When creating a short answer question there is a new field labeled “Web Parameter”. In this box simply put the name for the web parameter.
2) When calling the URL to the form or survey add the following to the end of the URL: “?web_param_name1=web_param_value1&web_param_name2=web_param_value2” .
When the URL is accessed by a user we will evaluate the URL for any web parameters. If we find web parameters and they match to short answer questions that have web parameters then we will initialize the field with the values passed in. If a web parameter is not passed then we do not preload the field.
To see a really good example of how this works:
1) Go to the Web Services Toolbox: https://illinois.edu/toolbox
2) Select a tool on the left hand navigation like the link “setup” under Form Builder.
3) Now select the URL labeled Contact Us at the very top of the web page.
You will now see that we have pre populated the web form with the user’s name, email address and the tool they are using. If the user happened to be editing a particular form, survey, calendar, blog, etc. and pressed the contact us link, they would notice that the ID of the item would also be pre populated. We so often receive help desk requests from users asking for help but they forget to send us the ID of the item they need help with. This allows us to improve our overall response time.
Another way this feature would be very helpful would be for reporting issues with a web site. The question asking for the URL of the page in question could be pre populated via JavaScript as a web parameter. We are working on this today and hope to have this added to the Illinois.edu web site as an improved way for people to report issues with web pages they are viewing.
As always, Web Services loves your feedback. Please let us know what else we can do for you.
Thanks,
Lance Campbell
Software Architect
Web Services at Public Affairs
217-333-0382
