Cascading Dropdowns
Greetings from the beautiful Sierra Nevadas and High Desert of northwest Nevada. I'm getting stuck creating two cascading dropdown menus for classifying new inventory items. There are separate tab...
Forum Discussion
Rob,
To get this to work there are three relationships and then a conditional in the Inventory table
Category 1 << Category 2
This will allow you to build all the descriptions needed to categorize the inventory.
Category 1 << Inventory
The highest level of categorization of Inventory
Category 2 << Inventory
The second level of categorization if Inventory
If you were the only user you would be done. However we now need to prevent people from selecting a Category 2 that is not a child of the Category 1.
There is two steps to this
Go back to the relationship for Category 2 << Inventory.
You need to add Related Category 1 as a Look Up field in Inventory from the Category 2 relationship
It will rename that field to something like Related Category 2- Related Category 1
Last step is to Properties for the field Related Category 2 in the Inventory table
In the section Reference field options enable the Conditional Values check box
There are two drop downs in there that have to be set
The first one you need to set to Related Category 1
The second on you set to the look up field Related Category 2- Related Category 1
That last step prevents the user from selecting any Category 2 values that do not have have the same Category 1 parent as Inventory. In fact it will not let you pick a Category 2 until a Category 1 has been selected.
Send me a note if you have any problems and we can get this fixed quickly for you.
Don
[email protected]
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Don Larson
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To get this to work there are three relationships and then a conditional in the Inventory table
Category 1 << Category 2
This will allow you to build all the descriptions needed to categorize the inventory.
Category 1 << Inventory
The highest level of categorization of Inventory
Category 2 << Inventory
The second level of categorization if Inventory
If you were the only user you would be done. However we now need to prevent people from selecting a Category 2 that is not a child of the Category 1.
There is two steps to this
Go back to the relationship for Category 2 << Inventory.
You need to add Related Category 1 as a Look Up field in Inventory from the Category 2 relationship
It will rename that field to something like Related Category 2- Related Category 1
Last step is to Properties for the field Related Category 2 in the Inventory table
In the section Reference field options enable the Conditional Values check box
There are two drop downs in there that have to be set
The first one you need to set to Related Category 1
The second on you set to the look up field Related Category 2- Related Category 1
That last step prevents the user from selecting any Category 2 values that do not have have the same Category 1 parent as Inventory. In fact it will not let you pick a Category 2 until a Category 1 has been selected.
Send me a note if you have any problems and we can get this fixed quickly for you.
Don
[email protected]
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Don Larson
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Thank you, Don. Your "Last Steps" were the pieces I was missing, and I have made it work just as I had hoped...
...with one exception. The dropdown menus contain just what I specified EXCEPT for the item at the bottom which allows the user to add a category. I don't want the general user to be able to add a Category 1 or Category 2. We had users being lazy and adding a new category when they had something unfamiliar to them, rather than think through how it could fit into an existing category.
I have hidden the Category 1 and Category 2 tables from the Table Bar so users can't see them, but those dropdown menus are setting me up for trouble with that "add" option. Can I turn that option off?
And, thank you again for getting me over the obstacle.
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Rob Vugteveen
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...with one exception. The dropdown menus contain just what I specified EXCEPT for the item at the bottom which allows the user to add a category. I don't want the general user to be able to add a Category 1 or Category 2. We had users being lazy and adding a new category when they had something unfamiliar to them, rather than think through how it could fit into an existing category.
I have hidden the Category 1 and Category 2 tables from the Table Bar so users can't see them, but those dropdown menus are setting me up for trouble with that "add" option. Can I turn that option off?
And, thank you again for getting me over the obstacle.
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Rob Vugteveen
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- Rob,
Users creating bad data and being lazy.... So many stories.
To prevent this, change the permissions on those two tables to prevent certain User Roles from being able to Add Records.
Go to settings for the table in question
The right hand column is Workflow & Permissions
The second one down is Access
This will show you all the roles and the permissions the have in that table
Uncheck the 4th column from the right, Add
Do this for both tables Category 1 and Category 2
Now they can use the data in those tables but not add to it. I suggest you also take away their ability to Modify.
Don't take away View as suddenly they will be unable categorize the Inventory items.
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Don Larson
Paasporter
Westlake OH
------------------------------- Many thanks to Don and Babi for guiding me to success with the cascading dropdowns. My boss is ecstatic to finally have this capability in our inventory system.
I now face the consequences of that success with another problem, but I'll put that in a separate thread.
(one-time internal conversion from the old category method to the new one)
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Rob Vugteveen
------------------------------- Happy to hear that, Rob.
Feel free to connect on your further queries.
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Babi Panjikar
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