Referencing Form Fields in JavaScript

Accessing fields

In the HTML document object model (DOM), the current form is named _sdForm.
This line of code gets a reference to it and puts it in the form variable:

var form = document._sdForm;

To find the name of a field in the platform:

1. Go to > Customization > Objects > {object} > Fields
2. Find the label of the field you're interested in
3. Get its name from the Field Name column
   That name can then be used in the JavaScript code.

Fields of type TextField, TextArea, Date, DateTime, Time, and URL can be accessed using _sdForm[0]. For example, this line of code gets a reference to the first_name field, and puts it in the variable elem:

var elem = _sdForm[0].first_name;

Fields have two properties that you can access in JavaScript:

• name: the name of the field
• value: the value of the field

So this line retrieves the value of the first_name field:

var fName = elem.value;

As does this longer version:

var fName = _sdForm[0].first_name.value;

The values returned are:

• Boolean - for Checkbox fields
• Array of String - For a Multi Select Picklist, where each string is the value of an item in the picklist.
• String - for all other fields, including Lookup fields

Updating fields

The method used to update a field depends on the field type. All of the methods have the general form:

set...Value(_sdForm, field, value);

Here are examples of the different methods:

setTextFieldValue(_sdForm, ”first_name”, ”Adam”);
setPickListValue(_sdForm, ”first_name”, ”Adam”);
setMultiPickListValue(_sdForm, ”first_name”, [”new”,”closed”]); 
    // value is an array of strings
setRadioButtonValue(_sdForm, ”first_name”, ”Adam”);
setCheckboxState((_sdForm, ”first_name”, true);  // checked
setCheckboxState((_sdForm, ”first_name”, false); // unchecked
setLookupValue(_sdForm, "project_number", "123456", "My Project");
    // where 123456 is the record ID of the target record 
    // "My Project" is the value of the record locator field(s) for that record

Learn more: Record Locator

Example - Update the field value of a text field

To update the field value of a text field first_name, use the following syntax:

setTextFieldValue(_sdForm,”first_name”,”Adam”)

Example - Update the field value of a Lookup field

To update the field value of a Lookup field, two parameters are required:

RecordID

lookup.value

This is the Record Id of the record in the object

Field value

lookup_name.value

This is the value of the record in the object

To update the field value of a lookup field (project_number), use the following syntax:

form.project_number.value = "123456"; 
// 123456 is the internal record identifier of the record present in lookup object
form.project_number_name.value = "My Project"; 
// My project is the value present in the record locator field(s) of the lookup object