Forum Discussion

RachelMiller's avatar
RachelMiller
Qrew Cadet
4 years ago

Choices For Selection Field/Look Up Fields

I apologize in advance for how I try to explain my scenario but hopefully someone can help.

I have 2 tables in my app with a relationship set up.  "Sites" and "Extracts" with Sites being the parent table.  When I enter a record on the Extracts table, I want field Health System to be the field I select from and 5 other fields from the Sites table to populate based on my selection.  This is working except that the Health System field is populating with a choice from a different field until I save the record.  I've attached a document showing what is happening.  I also want the selection list to show different fields in the selection box.

I hope this makes sense and the attachment shows enough details.

------------------------------
Rachel Miller
------------------------------
  • np,
    There are two ways to control this.  The first thing that you wanna do is go to the advanced properties for the table where these names come from and set up to three record picker fields. The record picker fields are fields that help users pick records!  That should be a housekeeping thing that you do on every single table that you create.

    But beyond that you can create any report you like and call it for example "drop down list of active Health Systems".  You can then  include any fields you like and control the sort and also have filters on that report. If you go that route then you set the form properties to use that report instead of the default record picker.

    ------------------------------
    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
    ------------------------------
    • RachelMiller's avatar
      RachelMiller
      Qrew Cadet
      Thanks Mark!  Changing the record picker fields got me half way there.  My issue now is the field that I want users to pick from is now set to Entity instead of Health System Name.  I'm not sure how that changed since I only made the record picker change so far and I made Health System Name the first one.  Any idea what made it change to entity and how I can change it to the field I want?

      ------------------------------
      Rachel Miller
      ------------------------------
      • MarkShnier__You's avatar
        MarkShnier__You
        Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
        I suspect this is the issue:

        If you look at the relationship where the drop down is coming from, you will see that there is a lookup field of Entity which is set to be the "Reference Proxy" in purple.  The "Reference Proxy"  field is meant to be the field that best represents the Parent Record especially when the Key field of the Parent record is meaningless to the users, such as [Record ID#].

        On that relationship the field at the top right hand side will be the field for related parent. (whatever you call Parent).  That is the field that we do not want to expose to users because it's not meaningful. So edit the field for related parent and you would likely find that the proxy field i.e. the lookup field Best represents the parent is set to entity. Edit that to be set to [Health System Name].

        Then on your form, you need to to put the field for Health System Name on the form that is the field which will allow your users to choose the correct Parent.  The entity field will be relegated to just be a normal look up field and will not populate until the health system name is selected.

        ------------------------------
        Mark Shnier (YQC)
        mark.shnier@gmail.com
        ------------------------------