Creating pre-populated records with lightning:recordEditForm

A typical use case when creating records is to populate some fields in advance, and then let the user fill in the rest of required fields. Let’s say that we want to create account records, having a pre-populated description, like this:

If you want to do this in a Lightning Component while using lightning:recordEditForm, you could do it the next way:

<aura:component implements="flexipage:availableForAllPageTypes" access="global" >
    <lightning:card title="Add account">
        <div class="slds-p-around_medium">
            <lightning:recordEditForm objectApiName="Account" aura:id="createAccountForm" onsubmit="{!c.handleSubmit}">
                <lightning:messages/>
                <lightning:inputField fieldName="Name"/>
                <lightning:inputField fieldName="Phone"/>
                <div class="slds-p-vertical_x-small">
                     <dt class="slds-item_label slds-text-color_weak slds-truncate">Description</dt>
                     <dd class="slds-item_detail slds-truncate">This is a default description</dd>
                </div>
                <lightning:inputField fieldName="Website"/>
                <lightning:button type="submit" name="Submit" label="submit" class="slds-m-top_medium"/>
            </lightning:recordEditForm>
        </div>
    </lightning:card>
</aura:component>

As you can see, I am using some SLDS styles to show a static text for Description field. You could use an attribute instead and set it from the controller with the value you want to pre-populate.

This is the controller:

({
    handleSubmit : function(component, event, helper) {
        event.preventDefault(); // Prevent default submit
        var fields = event.getParam("fields");
        fields["Description"] = 'This is a default description'; // Prepopulate Description field
        component.find('createAccountForm').submit(fields); // Submit form
    }
})

What we are doing is to intercept the event, and set a value for the Description field, which by default was not included in the Javascript object.

Thanks to Stephen Woods for the support.