Best Practices

  • 1.  Ian's Insights Ep. 4 - Push to repeat

    Posted 01-13-2022 10:00
    Edited by Pat Cooney 02-06-2024 11:38

    In this post, I am going to be using a form that is available in our Form Library to chat about a useful tool to save the person filling in the form some time. I am going to be using a Building Inspection form to demonstrate this but you can use the same technique with data coming from any source (like Salesforce)  

    To make pushing to a repeat section work properly, you need to ensure that the data source is set up correctly. The way that this works is that ProntoForms goes and looks through the column in the data source that is defined in the question, finds all the values which are identical and writes them into a repeat row for each unique value. This is much easier to demonstrate than it is to write out...

    As mentioned earlier, this is coming from the Building Inspection form that is found in the Form Library. This is a perfect example of how you would set up a data source for a push to repeat.

    The Building column is the source of our dropdown question in the form (ensure that you have “Hide duplicate options” checked off because we will certainly have duplicates in this column.

    Configuration to push data to other questions:  

    This is a
    snippet of the actual data source that is being used:



    Based on the images above, when a user answers the Building question in the form as “Building C” then we will push the values from the Floor column (as defined in the dropdown question), putting “Floor 1” into the first row, “Floor 2” into the second, and so on, until we have pushed all the instances of Building C from the data source into the repeat section.  

    IN THE APP:


    After selecting the Building:


    Using that same technique, you could pull in all the cases that a current account has opened, or all the open Work Orders that a technician has worked on that day. There are many uses for pushing data into repeat sections!  

    Do you currently make use of the Push to Repeat functionality in any of your forms? If so, share your ideas!  


    #TechTalkImplementation
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    Ian Chamberlain
    Implementation Specialist
    ProntoForms
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  • 2.  RE: Ian's Insights Ep. 4 - Push to repeat

    Adopter
    Posted 05-25-2023 14:32

    Hi Ian,

    This is a really cool idea! I'm working on an implementation with this technique using a SharePoint List (SPL) as a data source. The idea is to create a flexible inspection form where other users can update the question list in the SPL without having to go in and edit the form.

    Here's my question: is there any way to control the order of the questions when they fill into the repeatable section? From my testing it appears that the table fills in based on the item ID order in the SPL. I tried specifying a sort order for the question that pushes into the repeatable section, but that didn't seem to work. I'd like to specify another column to sort by, that way users could go in and "insert" questions into the middle of the list by ordering them appropriately.

    Thanks!



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    Mark Warwick
    Gas Engineer
    PG&E
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  • 3.  RE: Ian's Insights Ep. 4 - Push to repeat

    Posted 05-29-2023 14:31
    Edited by Erin Longhurst 05-29-2023 14:53

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for the question! Unfortunately, that's not something we currently do, though our Professional Services team may be able to help in this particular case as there may be a technical workaround.

    I'm very curious about your use case and what you're trying to do, particularly with this description:

    The idea is to create a flexible inspection form where other users can update the question list in the SPL without having to go in and edit the form.

    What's the goal with pushing to repeats? I'd love to hear more about this particular use case in case there's an easier way to go about it.

    Thank you,



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    Erin Longhurst
    Product Manager
    ProntoForms
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