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  • 1.  Autopopulating fields from another relationship

    Posted 08-30-2018 15:31
    Forgive me, for I know not what I ask. I inherited a very poor "CRM" from my predecessor, and I'm a sales manager with no IT or programming experience. Thank goodness this was set up in QuickBase, because it has been a very friendly infrastructure for me to learn how to do this, but I have a whole three weeks of experience.

    I have five tables that I am working with here:
    Clients
    Communications
    Opportunities
    Contacts
    Reminders

    I have several table to table relationships - Clients is our main table, and is the parent table to Communications, Opportunities, Contacts, and Reminders.

    Opportunties and Contacts are parent tables to Reminders.

    Opportunities and Reminders are also the parent table to Communications.

    I want my reps to be able to create reminders from Clients, Communications, Opportunities, and Contacts.

    My first struggle: Let's say they are looking in Opportunity 1 for Client ABC. They want to add a reminder to follow up. I want them to be able to click "Add Reminder," and have a new Reminder form pop up with Company ABC already populated.

    Can this be done?

    Thank you!


  • 2.  RE: Autopopulating fields from another relationship

    Posted 08-30-2018 19:32
    Hi Carerra,

    I'm really glad to hear you are finding Quick Base accessible while you are getting to know your app and planning your future changes. For your question this is a way to create a button to add a Reminder from many places and have it tie back to that Client record. By default when you create a relationship a new button is made to help you create child records from the parent. If you go into the field properties for that button you will typically see something like:

    URLRoot() & "db/" & [_DBID_WORKORDERS] & "?a=API_GenAddRecordForm&_fid_22=" & URLEncode ([Record ID#])& "&z=" & Rurl()

    To break it down what this button is doing is saying take me to my child table (in this case Work Orders) and open up a form and bring over the parent records Record ID and put it into the Related Parent field (field id 22) in my child table. This way when you go to the reminder record the relationship is already set up for you. Since you are starting in the middle by adding from Opportunities the pre made button is grabbing your Related Opportunity but not your Related Client information. 

    Looking at the field setting for your Add Reminder button you can actually go in and edit it to have it also grab the Related Parent for your Opportunity and pass it down to the related parent field on your Reminders table after you get a little information. For that you want to know the Field ID for the Related Client field on your Reminders (You can find this by opening up the Reminders table, finding the Related Client field on the Reminder table, and writing down its field id that number that shows up in the field settings). Then you need to know the name of your Related Client field in your Opportunities (Most likely it will be Related Client) from there you can edit the button to capture that information. 

    For my example lets say that the Related Client field in my Workorders table is 21 and the Related Client field in my Opportunities is Related Client. I would alter the button like below:

    URLRoot() & "db/" & [_DBID_WORKORDERS] & "?a=API_GenAddRecordForm&_fid_22=" 
    & URLEncode ([Record ID#])& "&_fid_41=" & [Related Client] & "&z=" & Rurl()

    What I have done is add on to that button to include "&_fid_41=" & [Related Client] & which tell its to grab the value from Related Client on my Opportunities table and put it into my Related Client field on my new Reminder I am going to create. You just need to take your existing buttons and edit them to include that extra piece of information. If you aren't feeling up to making that change on your own you can also always open up a support case with a Care Team to help walk you through how you would update one of your buttons. I hope this information is helpful. 



  • 3.  RE: Autopopulating fields from another relationship

    Posted 08-30-2018 23:11
    This was it! It took me about eighteen tries and two hours of talking myself through it (I think all the staff outside my office thinks I'm going bonkers), but it did come together.

    So I am assuming that if I wanted to do something really crazy, like add a Communication from a Reminder, I would just edit the formula in the "Add Communication" button of Reminders by extending this formula in the same pattern?

    I did figure out reasonably early on (as in, last week), that I was best off duplicating my app and renaming it "Carrera's Test App." This lets me trial run edits and changes without creating a huge mess in my primary app, and minimizes any downtime that my reps have while actually using the app.

    Thank you!


  • 4.  RE: Autopopulating fields from another relationship

    Posted 08-31-2018 16:28
    That is right, you can use the same method to edit other add record buttons in much the same way. They just need to be updated to use the right field ids and field names.

    Having a test app is also a great idea, it gives you a safe place to practice your changes. I have several test apps I maintain just for testing and planning. I'm glad the information was helpful Carrera and have a great day!