Can Field Selections Be Made to Influence Other Fields?

[Gary Ownsby]

I not sure of the exact terminology of this but my goal is for selections (choices) in one field to affect what next fields are displayed to the user.

A simple example of this would be in a home inventory-type “app” wherein I’m selecting “Hand Tools” from a list of types of tools. When hand tool is selected, a different set of choices to describe the tool would be presented vs had I selected “Power Tools” where I might want to select things like “gas, electric” and if electric to identify if it were AC-powered or battery…if battery what voltage (18v, 24v, 40v).

I have other software that does this type of choice-driven process; however, I like Tap Forms much better overall. Is their a way to do this in Tap Forms? I’m sure not an expert on Tap Forms and it does a great job for many, many things that I do. Thank you.

Gary

[Brendan]

Hi Gary,

This is what I would call ‘cascading pick lists’. I don’t have that kind of behaviour in Tap Forms at the moment, but I have been asked about it before. There are other variations on this theme too, such as if a certain value is selected from a pick list or a certain value is entered into a number or text field, then display or don’t display a predefined set of fields following that field. It can get fairly complex with the rules.

Other software probably does this because they have a predefined set of fields that they prompt the user to fill in whereas Tap Forms is a generic database tool that can be completely customized.

But if you let me know what the other apps are that have this behaviour, I’d like to see how they’ve implemented it.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Gary Ownsby]

Brendan,

The software I’ve used with the cascading functionality is Alpha Four and also FormStack.com has a similar capability. I use those mostly for integration into commercial websites. I mean no criticism of Tap Forms when I reference other software as doing this or that. I remain amazed and impressed with everything that Tap Forms is able to do. ‘Sure makes my life better!

Thank you.

Gary

[Brendan]

Hi Gary,

I did not take it as criticism at all. I was just curious to see how they implemented it.

It’s a very common thing in web apps for sure. But iOS and Mac apps maybe not so much, unless they’re more specialized apps. Although on Mac there’s of course cascading popup menus which is very common.

I just need to think about what a proper implementation would be for both Mac and iOS and how to structure the data in Tap Forms to support that sort of thing. There’s a lot of ways to do it. Are the cascade fields visible until you select a value? Do the cascade fields stay visible but disabled? How do you establish relationships between one value and another? Or between one field and another? Just a bunch of things to think about.

I really appreciate the feature request. It’s what drives the development of Tap Forms.

Thanks,

Brendan

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