Submitting Data to 3rd Party Required Name Attribute

I have come to understand that there is no way to change the name attribute on the form fields. This is a big problem for me.

I'm using Gravity Forms on a multisite installation and need to know how I can have users create forms and have the data submit to a 3rd party application. I need to be able to tell the User Admin how to add a parameter that will tell me that "First Name" is actually "first_name".

Right now when I look at the $entry var values this is what I get.
id 13,
form_id 1,
date_created 2012-08-21 16:00:02,
is_starred 0,
is_read 0,
ip ::1,
source_url http://localhost/,
post_id ,
currency USD,
payment_status ,
payment_date ,
transaction_id ,
payment_amount ,
is_fulfilled ,
created_by 1,
transaction_type ,
user_agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:14.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1, status active,
1 Jesse,
2 Friedman,
3 highfive@domain.com,
4 (401)555-5555,
5 ,
6.3 ,
6.6 ,

Now I could obviously code something using the gform_after_submission hook to turn the $key "1" into "first_name" then submit it. Sounds easy enough...

The problem is I won't know what 1 equals.

I thought about using jQuery to rewrite the name attribute on the input using a css class on the parent li. That opened another can of worms because the form stopped validating.

Then I thought about using the query string functionality but it only allows for GET. On that note is there a hook that will grab those values before the form is submitted or validated? If so what am I looking for?

Is there anyway you can think that would give me the ability to know what field is which without having prior knowledge of the form markup?

Thanks Alex

I would prefer to do this with Option 2 since it seems more semantic. I understand that I'll be making a new field in the form field addition section right? So essentially under the "Advanced" tab under class name I could make a new field and call it "3rd Party Attribute Name" or something to that effect. Then the User Admin could put a string in that field that would give me a relationship.

My question is how does that translate to either data in the $entry string or HTML markup when the form is created? Also I need this to be a global solution for all forms created now and in the future.

I just read this again, are you actually suggesting that I change the name attribute from "input_1" to "first_name" with jQuery? I did this once already but it broke validation.

Got it done, thanks for the help