Pick list based on a form not updated when value is changed in form

[julien]

I created a form 2 with a pick list which points to form 1: if I update the value of the field in form 1, the value is not propagated into the pick list of form 2…

Is there a way to do that?

[Brendan]

Pick Lists just copy the value from the Pick List into the field. There’s no connection to them after that.

You would need to use a Link to Form field if you want to join forms together so that if you make a change in the child form it reflects that change in the parent form.

Thanks,

Brendan

[julien]

Unfortunately the Link to Form is not appropriate for what I want to do:
– I want that if I make a change in the parent form that replicates to the child form
– I want to be able to choose (pick) the value in the parent form, not display the contents of the child form

Could this be a future enhancement to pick list?

[Brendan]

Well, with an inverse one-to-many relationship you can add a Calculation field that can pull out specific field values from the parent form and display them on the child form.

An example formula might be:

Clients::First Name

That would display the first name from the parent’s First Name field.

What you do is setup a One to Many relationship between the Parent and the Child forms. Then you add a Calculation field to the Child form with a formula like the above. All that formula does is references the Clients form and pulls out the value of the First Name field and displays it as the result. You would need to tell your Calculation field to return Text for the Result Type.

[julien]

I see but when you do that, it displays as a table, although you can filter out the fields you want to show, you cannot display a drop-down list to choose from.

[Brendan]

The inverse displays as a table if it’s a many-to-many Link Type. If it’s a one-to-many the inverse displays in a similar way to the single-column list view with field values displayed on top of each other showing only a single record.

[julien]

OK I finally understood the concept behind the one-to-many relationship (thanks to the video on vimeo) and how it can be used with the calculation field.

I see a few problems with that approach:
– the calculation such as Clients::First Name is possible only when there is an inverse relationship shown on the child form, which is something one may not want although this can be easily solved by creating a layout without the resulting table
– in the child form, the First Name will display in the calculation field for all records created prior to the calculation field creation… but for any record created after the calculation field creation, these will not display the First Name

[Brendan]

Yes, I would need to add a One to One relationship so that you don’t have to have an inverse one-to-many relationship to avoid having that table display on the parent form.

[julien]

Is this something you can introduce?
With the ability to pick and choose how one wants to display the content in the child form (text box, drop-down, etc.)

I understand this is the way you designed the behaviour of the relationships between table: that the values from one table are synced into another table through this relationship, but with this limitation it is not usable for me.

Thus why I opted in the meantime to use pick lists linked to forms to display the content nicely in the child form… but the content gets out of sync if there is a change in the parent form’s field value.

[Brendan]

Adding a One to One relationship is something I may consider doing in a future update. But I can’t guarantee it’s something I will be doing in the next few updates. The workaround of course is to just use the inverse relationship and ignore the other side of it with the table view of the data.

And in any case, if I added a One to One relationship, what would I do if someone said “now I’d like to be able to see all the records which I’ve linked this record to”. Well, that’s just a one-to-many relationship again.

[julien]

I’ve been reviewing different threads and it looks I am not the only one confronted to this problem and asking an enhancement.

Today it is a pain:
1) either you use the great pick lists in a form which provide pull-down menu in the form but once the value is set, any changes from the parent form are not replicated
2) either you use the one-to-many relationships but it is impossible even with a calculation in the child form to display a pull-down menu / pick-list which represents data that is maintained in the parent form

This is really problematic.

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