Forum Discussion

TonyGonzalez's avatar
TonyGonzalez
Qrew Trainee
6 months ago

Help with Parent Child records - In other apps

I have two tables - Departments and Divisions.  They are related in that each Department can have multiple divisions.  Works fine on the parent table.  

Where I need help is using that in another table.  In table 3, i have Department and Division fields.  But, I want Division to ONLY be the available options based on Department.  For example, if you choose Public Works, then I only want Solid Waste and Admin to show up, as those are the child records of Public Works.  But, if you choose Information Tech, I only want the options of IT and GIS to show up as it's children.

How to do this?



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Gonzo - A Newbie, but learning fast. (Former SmartSheet evangelist who is quickly converting to QuickBase)
IT Director City of New Braunfels
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4 Replies

  • Conditional drop down to the rescue. So a great feature of Quickbase has what's called a conditional drop-down. (sometime we call it CDD) 

    So, say your third table is called Work Orders and in creating a Work Order to be assigned out you need to choose the Department and then choose the Division. These are going to be look ups off those two respective tables so you build those relationships.  One department has many Work Orders.  One Division has many Work Orders.    

    But the magic happens when you then edit the field properties for Related Department on hyour Work Orders Table.   Scroll about halfway down on the field properties and you will see a checkbox for conditional values. 

    "The values in this field depend on a selection in another field"

    Then in the first drop-down you select your data entry field for Division or Related Division and then on the second drop-down field you select to only show Departments matching that Division.  

    You'll find this works beautifully and while it may not be so relevant in your use case it performs exceptionally well with very high record counts. So for example if you had 10.000 different choices for departments the drop-down list populates pretty much instantly based on the conditional filter.



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    Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • TonyGonzalez's avatar
      TonyGonzalez
      Qrew Trainee

      Mark, I have finally gotten back to this.  Thank you for the explanation.  I am not sure I have done this properly.  In fact, I know I have screwed it up.  When I got to new entry form, I have somehow clugged it up and the dropdown won't populate at all and you can see the three elipses indicating it is trying to load.  I have shut the app down at this point.  So, I am going to have to go in and edit the field properties.  Can you give me a more elementary rundown of exactly what to choose in what field?

      I am not sure which field I should be working in.  Department or Related Department?  Division or Related Division?



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      Gonzo - A Newbie, but learning fast. (Former SmartSheet evangelist who is quickly converting to QuickBase)
      IT Director City of New Braunfels
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      • TonyGonzalez's avatar
        TonyGonzalez
        Qrew Trainee

        Screenshot of fields if that helps



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        Gonzo - A Newbie, but learning fast. (Former SmartSheet evangelist who is quickly converting to QuickBase)
        IT Director City of New Braunfels
        ------------------------------