CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm curious to know if anyone has tried passing $_GET and $_POST variables to a form with any success?

Specifically, I'm thinking about ways to streamline the user experience by passing information he/she has previously entered. The following illustrates a scenario:

• The user comes to my website. On the sidebar, is a module for making a contribution, into which he/she can enter a value.
• The user clicks "continue" and the variable is passed to an existing CiviContribute contribution page
• Once the user lands on the contribution page, the "amount" field has changed based on the passed variable. Ideally, this would only display the amount as a hidden variable and HTML text, since the user has already indicated his/her preference and having it appear in form elements would be redundant.

This could (and should) be a global option, whereby any form can accept an incoming value simply by passing the variable with the same name. I've seen this behavior in other similar CRM systems with user-facing forms and besides its helpfulness, it's also certainly an indicator of a solid design.

Does this exist for CiviCRM? If so, how does one use it? If not, can it be hooked somehow, and has anyone tried it?