CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hey all,
We have a lot of repeat team members (ie, event participants) for each of our events/teams.  What we'd like to do is build a little tool that will look up the participants previous event registration information and pre-populate the new event registration page with all the old information, saving people lots of time (our registrations are larger forms).

We do not have our participants set up with logins to Civi, so we'd be building an external tool that does a quick DB lookup based on their unique information (first name, last name, email).  I can build all that just fine, pretty straightforward.

Once I have their previous event participant record information, what's the best way to pass those fields to the new registration form?  It looks like I can do it by sending POST variables from my form, but I'm noticing that the new registration form has some odd names to the fields when I look at them through Firebug - like the email field is really "email-5" and a phone number may be "phone-1-2."  It makes me wonder if those names are dynamically generated and if, in the future, they will change and mess up our tool.

Can I rely on this method of sending POST variables?  Or should I be using a different strategy to pre-populate an event registration page with data?

Thanks!