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A
Anonymous
September 10, 2015
Question

Form Specific Custom Fields

  • September 10, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 2623 views

Is there a way to create a custom field housed only in an individual form, not in Marketo at large?

An example would be a form for an event with a custom field for whether they want chicken or steak for dinner. We would want this custom field to only be available for use in that one form.

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1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
September 10, 2015

After a fashion, yes. I call this a flash field.  The concept behind a flash field is to have information that is associated with the lead without having to create a new custom field. There are (at least) 3 approaches:

  1. Have a text field LastFlashField and a textarea FlashFieldHistory.  Add LastFlashField to your form with the appropriate widget (select or radio buttons in your steak/chicken example). The server values should the field's current name as well as the value, in other words the choice "Steak" is stored in Marketo as "Dinner_20151001=Steak" rather than just "Steak."  In a flow, prepend the value of LastFlashField to FlashFieldHistory.  (Really, the history part is optional, but it'll give you an audit trail.)
  2. Create a rich text area on the form that includes your form widget.  On form submit, register a Munchkin activity (either Visit Web Page or Click Link, probably the latter) with the field value.  Then in the lead's ActLog you'll see a hit like Clicked Link: example.com/?Dinner_20151001=Steak. You can report on that like any other activity.
  3. A hybrid of the above. Add the text field LastFlashField to Marketo, but just so you have something to add to the form instead of having to create a form field from scratch.  You won't actually care what gets stored in this field because as in [2] you'll be registering a web activity instead.
    A
    Anonymous
    March 16, 2016

    Hi Sanford,

    Thank you for the suggestions to this question from Anna. We too want to track things like dietary requirements, etc. After reading through your suggestions, I am a bit confused about how to add the "flash field" (option 1) and what you mean by adding a rich text area that includes the "form widget" (option 2). Can you please clarify exactly how to add these items to the form? Thanks for your help!

    Melissa

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    March 16, 2016

    You will probably find [1] easier to set up. All you're doing is creating a field that can have a variable use, because you'll be prepending the current label (which you can customize in Form Editor) to the value when the form posts.

    MktoForms2.whenReady(function(form){
         form.onSubmit(function(form){
              var formEl = form.getFormElem()[0],
                   fieldLabelEl = formEl.querySelector('LABEL[for="LastFlashField"]'),
                   flashKey = (fieldLabelEl.textContent || fieldLabelEl.innerText);
              form.setValues({
                   LastFlashField : flashKey + '=' + form.getValues().LastFlashField
              });
         });
    });

    With this JS, if you set the label to "Favorite Food" and the user types "Pizza," the final value posted to Marketo is "Favorite Food=Pizza".

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