how to create a form that populates a form in email to receive data jotform

With Field Prepopulator, you can manually prepopulate your form with the user's data that you've already collected. But on some occasions, you may want to pass form data to prepopulate another form. If you're looking to do that, please proceed with the steps below.

Step 1: Set up two forms, namely Form 1 and Form 2. Below are demo forms you can submit to see how this method works.

Form 1: https://form.jotform.com/53541423066955.

Form 2: https://form.jotform.com/53542179889977.

You will have to add the URL parameters required to populate the form in the Email Alerts or Thank You Message page. Below is an example of how the URL is structured:

            https://form.jotform.com/53542179889977?fullName1[first]={fullName:first}&fullName1[last]={fullName:last}&email2={email}&textBox8={textBox}&textArea7={textArea}&dropDown4={dropDown}&radioButton5={radioButton}&checkBox6={checkBox:0},{checkBox:1},{checkBox:2}

Question Mark (?) represents that you're adding extra parameters in the form such as this prepopulation method.

Equal Sign (=) represents the value on a form field.

Ampersand (&) represents a new field in the parameter.

The Unique Name outside the curly brackets represents the fields from Form 2, and what's inside denotes the fields from Form 1. To get the Unique Name, check the following guide: How to find Field IDs and Names.

To be more specific, here's how each part of the URL works:

For form fields with a single input or single text box, let's say email field, short text entry, long text entry, single select, dropdown, this is how they are structured:

Email field:

email2={email}

The parameter states that you want the email field in Form 2 (email2) to be filled out using the email input from Form 1 (email).

Single Choice field:

radioButton5={radioButton}

The parameter states that you want to select the radio button in Form 2 ( radioButton5) to be filled out using the selected radio button in Form 1 (radioButton).

The single input is quite different for form fields with multiple textboxes or options, e.g., Full Name or Multiple Choice elements.

The Full Name field has two text boxes. The first one is for the First Name and the second box is for the Last Name. If you check the field name in the form source, you will see how the name attribute is structured.

In the prepopulated Form 2 URL, this is how it looks like when prepopulating the first and last names:

First Name:

fullName1[first]={fullName:first}

Last Name:

fullName1[last]={fullName:last}

You'll see that the right side of the parameter uses a colon (:), this is to specify which text box we want to get the value from. For the First Name, use first, and for the Last Name, use last.

For Checkboxes, this is how you get the value from Form 1:

checkBox6={checkBox:0},{checkBox:1},{checkBox:2}

The right side utilizes the colon (:) again, but we will use numbers after this character. The numbers are indexes to identify the checkboxes. There are three checkboxes in the demo form, which means the indexes are 0, 1, and 2. The options as you could see are separated by a comma.

As per the user guide given above, you'll find the unique names, including the indexes from the field's properties section:

Step 2: Add the structured Form 2 URL in the email template (either on your email notification or autoresponder email) or the Thank You Message page.

For the email templates, you can link the full URL or link it to a text.