Prefill adaptive form fields

Last update: June 24, 2024

CREATED FOR:

  • User
  • Developer

Adobe recommends using the modern and extensible data capture Core Componentsfor creating new Adaptive Formsor adding Adaptive Forms to AEM Sites pages. These components represent a significant advancement in Adaptive Forms creation, ensuring impressive user experiences. This article describes older approach to author Adaptive Forms using foundation components.

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Introduction

You can prefill the fields of an adaptive form using existing data. When a user opens a form, the values for those fields are prefilled. To prefill data in an adaptive form, make the user data available as a prefill XML / JSON in the format that adheres to prefill data structure of adaptive forms.

Structure of prefill data

An adaptive form can have mix of bound and unbound fields. Bound fields are fields which are dragged from the Content Finder tab and contain non-empty bindRef property value in the field edit dialog. Unbound fields are dragged directly from the component browser of Sidekick and have an empty bindRef value.

You can prefill both bound and unbound fields of an adaptive form. The prefill data contains the afBoundData and afUnBoundData sections to prefill both bound and unbound fields of an adaptive form. The afBoundData section contains the prefill data for bound fields and panels. This data must be compliant with the associated form model schema:

  • For adaptive forms using the XFA form template, use the prefill XML compliant with the data schema of the XFA template.
  • For adaptive forms using XML schema, use the prefill XML compliant with the XML schema structure.
  • For adaptive forms using JSON schema, use the prefill JSON compliant with the JSON schema.
  • For adaptive forms using FDM schema, use the prefill JSON compliant with FDM schema.
  • For adaptive forms with no form model, there is no bound data. Every field is an unbound field and is prefilled using the unbound XML.

Sample Prefill XML structure 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<afData>
  <afBoundData>
     <employeeData>
        .
     </employeeData>
  </afBoundData>

  <afUnboundData>
    <data>
      <textbox>Hello World</textbox>
         .
         .
      <numericbox>12</numericbox>
         .
         .
    </data>
  </afUnboundData>
</afData>

Sample Prefill JSON structure 

{
   "afBoundData": {
      "employeeData": { }
   },
   "afUnboundData": {
      "data": {
         "textbox": "Hello World",
         "numericbox": "12"
      }
   }
}

For bound fields with same bindref or unbound fields with same name, data specified in the XML tag or JSON object is filled in all the fields. For example, two fields in a form are mapped to the name textbox in the prefill data. During runtime, if the first text box field contains “A”, then “A” is automatically filled in the second text box. This linking is called live linking of adaptive form fields.

Adaptive form using XFA form template

The structure of prefill XML and the submitted XML for XFA-based adaptive forms is as follows:

  • Prefill XML Structure: The prefill XML for XFA-based adaptive form must be compliant with the data schema of the XFA form template. To prefill unbound fields, wrap the prefill XML structure into /afData/afBoundData tag.

  • Submitted XML Structure: When no prefill XML is used, the submitted XML contains data for both bound and unbound fields in afData wrapper tag. If a prefill XML is used, the submitted XML has the same structure as the prefill XML. If the prefill XML starts with the afData root tag, the output XML also has the same format. If the prefill XML does not have afData/afBoundDatawrapper and instead starts directly from the schema root tag like employeeData, the submitted XML also starts with the employeeData tag.

Prefill-Submit-Data-ContentPackage.zip

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Sample containing prefill data and submitted data