Tables – duplicate between forms

It sounds like you’ve got two forms already and you want the same table on the two different forms. I’d suggest adding a third form that has the same structure as your table field and then use a “Link to Form” with the “JOIN” type. JOIN uses a field value that is common between the two forms to automatically build the links. In your case I think a customer ID would be a reasonable link value because you can put that on all three forms and link it together.

The Link to Form behaves similar to the table so you should be able to get the same effect in both places relying upon the same data.

Now I have a feeling that you might need this in thee future but a trick you can do with JOIN fields is to use a calculation field to JOIN on. You can use a calculation field to combine the values of two different fields together (via CONCAT) and use that value. In your example I can imagine a customer at some point stopping a service at which point they shouldn’t get invoiced for it in the future but you might want to include it in their printed invoice. You could add a checkbox or other flag that you check and use as a part of the composite key. The downside of this approach is that older invoices if reprinted will look different, so let’s think about that.

A JOIN field is great because it automatically updates values for you. A JOIN field is unfortunate because it automatically updates values for you. Thinking about “what services does the customer currently have active”, what you could do is when you generate an invoice you use a script to manipulation a normal “Link to Form” M:M field instead of a JOIN field. You would need to write a script to handle creating a link from the third form we created above to do it.

Give the JOIN field a try and see how it works out for you, if you feel we need to go down a little deeper on the scripted approach then I can give you a hand with that too.

Probably should remove that second screenshot for PII.