Discussions

 View Only

Best way to populate Team based on Manager Name

  • 1.  Best way to populate Team based on Manager Name

    Posted 02-06-2019 22:15
    Hi all,

    I am a QB rookie working with an existing but fairly simple app that tracks project requests. The current app has 1 table which includes Employee (requester), Manager (the manager of the employee), Team (for the requesting employee) and Project's Manager (the manager of the team implementing the project which may or may not be the same as the requester's manager) fields. The Project's Manager is populated by default with same user as Manager (of employee) with a dynamic business rule when the record is added. Currently, all of this data is manually input by the requester. 

    I've been asked to add another Team field to allow reporting by the Project Team vs just by Requester's Team. I would like to default the Team so that I don't have to ask users to enter the data manually and ensure consistency/correctness. 

    I know there are multiple ways to do this and I have tried a few different ways running into various limitations along the way. So far, the simplest way to do it seems to be creating a new table called "Profiles" which assigns Manager (type = User) to Team (drop down list). Profiles is a parent to Projects. This allows me to use the reference proxy to populate Team from the manager's profile. Then, in order to allow for different manager's for the requester and the project, I needed to create a 2nd parent/child relationship between Profiles/Projects. That part seems to be working fine.

    However, when I try to use a dynamic business rule to default the Project's Manager from the requester's Manager, nothing happens. I'm using the same rule that worked in my original app so I know the event is triggered but the value in Project's Manager is always blank unless I manually select a value from the record picker. Because the Project's Manager is the same ~75% of the time, I really want to be able to default the value from the requester's Manager. 

    Any advice on how to make this work is greatly appreciated. If this is a limitation because I am using lookup fields, I am open to other ways to meet the business requirement (using an automation to modify the record? some other way that I don't know?).

    Many thanks in advance!
    Meagan