Forum Discussion

liwalter's avatar
liwalter
Guide
8 years ago

Pass form values to PostPage via URL suffix

Hi there,

Is it possible to pass the search bar contents to the subject box when a user clicks a link to post to a forum?

Thanks,

Lionel

  • Wendy_S's avatar
    Wendy_S
    Boss
    8 years ago

    Hi!

     

    let me try to answer here.

    Yes it is. We (hp) have it set up this way.

    the caveat is

    1. You can't do this by yourself. This customizatiom requires Lithium's help (PS)

    2. I happen to know because recently we asked if we could stop the automated passing of the search term to the postpage subject field. PS needs to do this (at a $...perhaps)

     

    the readon to stop this? Well we see the way customers perform their search and found that in many cases they dont really describe their issue in such a way that it would make a good subject of a post. As keywords in topic subjects count heavily in the search logic we probably want customers to think about their question/postsubject. We do have some nice ghost text and a fly out on the post page to help customers write a good post/subject so this would be our fall back.

     

    hope this was a little helpful.

    let me know if you have more questions

     

    cheers

    Wen

  • ClaudiusH's avatar
    ClaudiusH
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    8 years ago

    There's a related discussion on how to perform passing the parameter using jQuery: https://community.lithium.com/t5/Support-Forum/Pass-form-values-to-PostPage-via-URL-suffix/m-p/299284#M11630

     

    But there is actually a URL parameter  as well which works both on the "New Post" as well as the "Choose Node" experience (and it comes free out of the box):

    message-subject=<subject>

    appended to the query string of each of these URLs allows you pre-populate the subject line, e.g.

    https://community.lithium.com/t5/forums/postpage/board-id/studio?message-subject=New%20test%20subject

    or

    https://community.lithium.com/t5/forums/postpage/interaction-style/board/choose-node/true/category-id/knowledgeandsupport/board-id/studio?message-subject=New%20support%20question

    allows you to have the subject field already filled.

     

    But take the good advice from Wendy_S and really think through the posting user flow:

    I know that on the Skype Community this was used for a while on the "Didn't find what you were looking for? Post a new question" flow. If your posting experience can't make it clear that the pre-populated subject line is just a starting point and should be edited by the member, you are likely to end up with many identically named topics. As a result your moderators have to go in and edit the topic titles to keep the board listing relevant.

    • liwalter's avatar
      liwalter
      Guide
      8 years ago
      Thanks Claudius! The URL parameters are exactly what I was after.
      • Wendy_S's avatar
        Wendy_S
        Boss
        8 years ago

        Thanks Claudius for that extra bit of education :-) 

        Helpful for me as well.

         

        I guess our use case was a little different then and in order to remove this automated passing of the search term to the post subject, we had PS set this up on the backend and we need Lithium to reverse the change we've once made.

         

        I understand now the passing of the search term to the post page could also be setup out of the box. Not sure why we went the other route then...could it be it wasn't possible OOB up to some point?

         

        Cheers

        Wendy