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How to Create A Sub - Form

  • May 30, 2017
  • 0 replies
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My app is a project management tool for building Custom Homes.  There are hundreds/thousands of design details that go into building homes and I need a way to track the design selections against an active project.  Several of the design selections could be: Paint color, Kitchen Cabinet Style, Kitchen countertop style, Flooring type, etc.

Is there a way to create an additional form within my Projects Table where I can fill out these details?  Adding them to the main project form page would make it extremely cluttered, and also, these selections usually come AFTER a project is created.  

In addition, I would eventually like to push these selections to an exact form to be sent to our field supervisor.

Thanks ahead of time for your suggestions.

Josh
    This topic has been closed for replies.

    My main suggestion is to have child tables for the different types of selections.  For example have a child table of flooring.  Then each room would have a record and it would have a form suitable to flooring.

    Then another table for Paint choices.

    I also suggest that you have a table of rooms so that these child tables can also be children of the rooms, so that on the rooms record, you would be able to see all the child Tables for the same elements such as flooring and paint.
    • anomDiebolt
    • Registered
    • May 30, 2017

    You might consider (1) using form rules to hide/show sections on an individual form and (2) create secondary forms to collect various related fields. Certain types of applications like insurance forms, loan forms etc can have an unending list of fields to collect as they ask everything under the sun. While the normal suggestion is to create child tables as Mark suggests this could get complicated in cases (like yours) where there are a lot of fields to collect.

    Another suggestion is rather than create a child table for each of your 75 categories, you might be able to create fewer child tables if you abstracted the child tables to model a "feature list", "amenities list",  "upgrades", or "pick list" rather than very specific child tables such as kitchen, bathroom, garage etc.

    More than likely you will have to use a combination of (1) multiple sections, (2) multiple forms and (3) multiple child tables to get to a sweet spot balancing convince of data entry / navigation and performance.

    Also, be careful of the arbitrary limit of 20 dynamic form rules. If you use one rule for each section, tied to a boolean formula to determine whether or not to show that section, you'll only be able to have 20 sections. I have this problem in my app.
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