Is there a way to pass values from an external website into a Live Agent pre-chat form?

Question

We have a pre-chat form where the button is going to sit on a website that isn't hosted on Salesforce Sites or a Community. We have data about the logged in user that we'd like to pass into some fields on the pre-chat form. Examples being name and company.

Is there a way to pass this data into a pre-chat form?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use the Deployment API to pass the account parameters using javascript on the webpage. You need to add the following 2 lines before the liveagent.init(..) method.

liveagent.addCustomDetail('Account_Name', 'GenePoint'); liveagent.findOrCreate('Account').map('Name','Account_Name',true,true,false);

You can add more fields to perform search. A more complete example from documentation can be found at the following link.

Creating Records Deployment API Code Sample

Full code from the sample VF page that I created to test this.
As soon as the chat is initialized, the system searches for an Account called GenePoint and displays the detail page automatically.

<apex:page>

  <a id="liveagent_button_online_573i0000000NZnE" href="javascript://Chat" style="display: none;" onclick="liveagent.startChat('573i0000000NZnE')">ONLINE</a><div id="liveagent_button_offline_573i0000000NZnE" style="display: none;">OFFLINE</div><script type="text/javascript">
if (!window._laq) { window._laq = []; }
window._laq.push(function(){liveagent.showWhenOnline('573i0000000NZnE', document.getElementById('liveagent_button_online_573i0000000NZnE'));
liveagent.showWhenOffline('573i0000000NZnE', document.getElementById('liveagent_button_offline_573i0000000NZnE'));
});</script>

<script type='text/javascript' src='https://c.la2c1.salesforceliveagent.com/content/g/js/32.0/deployment.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript'>

liveagent.addCustomDetail('Account_Name', 'GenePoint');
liveagent.findOrCreate('Account').map('Name','Account_Name',true,true,false);

liveagent.init('https://d.la2c1.salesforceliveagent.com/chat', '572i0000000NXE8', '00Di0000000jydC');

</script>

</apex:page>

Answer 2

You can definitely pass custom data from Live Agent into the pre-chat form.

You can use the Live Agent deployment method .addCustomDetail to add details in the web page where your live chat button appears. NOTE: This web page where the chat is initiated can be hosted anywhere, does not need to be a Salesforce page.

Then, in your pre-chat form, there is a javascript library you can include which has a javascript API you can use to retrieve any of those custom details you've passed in from the initiating page. The method is called prechat.init() and is documented here:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.live_agent_dev.meta/live_agent_dev/live_agent_accessing_details_prechat_API_preChatInit.htm

NOTE: To use this method, you'll need to include the prechat JS library in your pre-chat form. For some reason, I can't find the documentation for this, but, here is the general format:

<script type='text/javascript' src='[[YOUR SERVER]]/content/g/js/29.0/prechat.js'>

...where the [[YOUR SERVER]] hostname can be found in your deployment setup page. There is an example with the ‘deployment.js’. Replace ‘deployment.js’ with ‘prechat.js' to get the URL.