Parent-child form settings

With parent-child relationships, you can create an interlinking and dependencies between forms. It allows you to use the values of fields in a form as-is in other forms.

Parent and child forms are linked together with a key which is usually an identifier field present in both these forms. The key field in the child form will be displayed as a dropdown field with values of the submissions made to the parent form.

In the child form, the user can only select values that appear in the dropdown for the key field. The user cannot enter a new value. This is the key difference between Master forms and parent-child forms.

If the parent and child forms have more fields in common, you can also configure the settings such that the data entries made in a particular field of the parent form automatically get reflected in the associated fields of the child form based on the selected key field.

What is a parent form?

A parent form is a base form from which a child form can inherit the values of its fields.

What is a child form?

A child form inherits the values of the fields present in the parent form.

What is the purpose of parent-child forms?

The main purpose of parent-child forms is to use and auto-fill certain fields in the forms based on the values filled in the other forms. This reusability feature saves time and resources, and connects different forms creating a hierarchy.

Example

Let's dig deeper into this concept with the help of an example.

Let's say we have a form called Feature Requirement with the following fields.

The following entries have been made to the Feature ID field of the Feature Requirement form:

We want to use the entries made to the Feature ID field as options to a field in another form called Web Tasks in the following manner:

So here, we will set Feature Requirement form as a parent form and select a field that will act as key for the child form, Web Tasks.

To inhertit the key field values from the Feature Requirement form in the Web Tasks form, we will set the Web Tasks form as a child form and select Feature Requirement as its parent form.

The submitter will now be able to see the data entries made to the key field, Feature ID of the Feature Requirement form as options for the Case field of the Web Tasks form.

Hierarchy

Let's look at the details of one of the entries made to child form Web Tasks.

You can view the parent-child hierarchy of the form as given in the below image:

As shown in the above image, the hierarchical path of the child form, Web Tasks is as follows:

Feature Requirement/Feature - 1/Web Tasks

where,

• Feature Requirement is the parent form

• Feature - 1 is the value of the key field Feature ID of the parent form, Feature Requirement

• Web Tasks is the child form