Auto populate forms

If this isn't possible could it be done from info in the user's profile? IE if I set up custom fields in the profile such as 'Legal name' and 'Address' could those be brought into forms on nodes the users are filling out?

Thanks,
David
http://www.floridapets.org

I've done stuff like this, as well as adding some javascript to a checkbox for "shipping same as billing" to auto-populate one set of fields from another. It can't be done in core drupal, you have to theme your input form, then you can put values in fields when they're rendered, derived from user values or whatnot.

If you've never themed an input form, there're a few steps to doing it (it's not simple, but not overly complex either). You have to make a special phptemplate function call from your theme's template.php, like this:

This will allow the phptemplate engine to use somecontenttype-edit.tpl.php to craft the edit form. So the next step is to create a file called somecontenttype-edit.tpl.php in the same directory as your template.php file and put the following code in it:

If you had a simple text CCK field in your edit form called "companyname" (and therefore it was called $node->field_companyname[0]['value'] in code), you could pre-populate it from the current user's profile field of the same name by doing something similar to this in somecontenttype-edit.tpl.php instead:

This would pre-populate the contents of that form field prior to rendering it to the user's screen. The only down-side to doing it this way is that the input form's functionality is now tied to your theme, and changing themes at a later date will require you to be smart about it.