Adding Custom Object Lookup in Marketo Form

[Joon_Park]

Is there anyway to add a Custom Object Lookup in a Marketo Form?

I have a One custom object to many Lead relationship in accordance to Gregoire's suggestion here: https://nation.marketo.com/thread/38022-one-custom-object-to-many-leads-relationship

Is there anyway to have a lookup of the Custom Object in a Marketo Form? I don't see an option to use them in Forms, only using Custom Objects with Filters in the Docs.

[Josh_Hill13]

What's your use case?

[Joon_Park]

We have a one custom object to many leads relationship.

The user should be able to select the custom object that he/she is associated with in the Marketo form.

[Josh_Hill13]

How would this person know?

Not sure Marketo allows this yet. Did you check the docs?

[Joon_Park]

I did check the docs, they only show how to use them in Filters with Smart Campaigns.

So in the docs, they have examples with Students, Courses, and Enrollments. If Courses is a custom object, how would a user select a course?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Not possible.  COs are not exposed in forms.

You can use synthetic fields on forms and transport CO information in JSON blocks. Then do a nightly batch* to transform the JSON blocks into COs.

(You probably haven't given enough thought to using JSON text fields instead of COs. I've never been disappointed in using JSON as "poor man's COs" because they're so much more accessible -- both JS and Velocity can hit them.)

*While you may be tempted to use a trigger + webhook to update COs in real-time, I caution strongly against giving any end user the ability to consume API calls in this way. You don't have enough calls to make a resilient site.