Progessive Capture - Drop Down List with Titles

[Daniel Nespoli]

I'd like to create a drop down list field as part of one of our progressive captures. It's a department list.

I've created multiple drop down lists before but is there a way to create a drop down list with titles?

For example:

BRANDS AND COMMUNICATIONS

- Brand
- Digital

CORPORATE SERVICES

- IT
- HR

etc etc.

It's perhaps really simple and I'm just unaware.

Any help will be much appreciated.
Cheers!

Department Team.txt

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Daniel Nespoli thanks for the question

I am not sure this is possible in a single drop down, however have you considered using the conditional fields in the progressive capture forms to achieve a similar outcome?

Here is an example with your data.

My First drop down contains your top level choices - Corporate Services / Brands and Communication.

* if the choice is Corporate Services then the conditional field with the Corporate Choices is displayed

 

* However if the choice is Brands and Communication then the conditional field with the Brand and Communication Choice is displayed

 

The key here is that only the required conditional fields are displayed, in this case not both the Corporate Services choices and the Brand and Communication choices, nor a long list of drop downs which may not be relevant and the user may not know which ones to fill in.  These displayed conditional fields are based on the choices they have made in other fields on the same progressive capture form or answers to other questions on other progressive capture forms.

You can set these conditional fields in the progressive capture designer:

 

I have also attached an example progressive capture for the above so you can take a look at this on your own instance, see how it behaves, how it is configured and if it might work for you:

conditional-fields_example.pcf.txt

There is more info on the conditional fields and an example video on the wiki here: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Progressive_Capture_Designer

Hope this helps 

Steve

[Daniel Nespoli]

This is brilliant thank you Steven.

I'm going to give it a go now.

Thanks again

Dan

[Daniel Nespoli]

Hi Steven,

So here's a copy of my progressive capture overview:

The 'Department' Field Type is a 'Dynamic Drop Down Select Box' using a list I created with all our main departments:

As you can see, I have then included 'Conditional Fields - Departments' next in the Progressive Capture and followed your example which works perfectly when creating a ticket as a customer. However, I have a couple of questions:

1. Is there a way to remove the 'not answered' questions below as these appear in the ticket:

2. I can't see the sub department name on the form summary as part of the ticket as an Analyst or Customer:

I appreciate these are probably quite straight forward tweaks to make but this is all pretty new to me!

Hope you can help.

Thanks again,

Dan

[Dan Munns]

@Daniel Nespoli you can toggle the visibility of unanswered questions using the setting: 

app.request.questions.hideUnansweredQuestions

(guest.servicemanager.portal.request.questions.hideUnansweredQuestions will hide the unanswered questions in the service portal as well)

This can be found on the admin console under Home >  Hornbill Service Manager > Application Settings.

As for the second point you may need to set the question on the PC questions affected as below: 

Edit: Having a closer look at the second screenshot I realised that the image is from the request itself once raised, not the summary of the PC once logged. 

You may have to output the answers for sub departments into a custom field and then edit the summary panel on the request to show said custom field to show that info.

Edit 2: Is there a particular reason you have a new node for each question on your PC? (sorry being nosy) You could have all the information in one node (and therefore one page) for your custom nodes. May make for a better user experience. Just my 2 cents. 

[Steven Boardman]

@Daniel Nespoli glad it is working for you  

As @Dan Munnssaid there is a setting to control the visibility of unanswered questions, so that should address your first point. 

As for the second point, again Dan is correct, by default your progressive capture questions will not appear in the Details section of a request only in the Questions section. 

There are of course ways to achieve this and i will try to summarise the options below. 

The first thing to state is that on the self service portal we only display the Summary and Description fields in the Details section to the customer, so adding your questions into details sections as new fields will not display to the customer on the self service portal but it will be visible to the agents in the agents interface.

• Of course the sub-category will be in the questions section for both by default 
• You can choose to inject the sub-category into the summary or description fields as a variable so it is visible to both. 

There are two ways to interact with the answers to your progressive capture questions these are:

1. Map your progressive capture answers directly into custom fields, which in turn you display in the details section on the request - this is covered here on the wiki:  https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Mapping_Fields_from_Customised_Forms

2. In the business process designer you can use the Update Request options, and add the answers from your questions as variables into either the custom fields or the Summary and Description fields, both are covered here on the wiki: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Service_Manager_Business_Process_Workflow

There are a couple of wiki pages which are useful in understanding how to work with and injecting variables:

Variable Picker: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Variable_Picker

Request Variables: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Variables

In your situation as you will be using different progress capture questions to capture the sub category (conditional fields) it is not as straight forward as mapping one answer to a custom field as you can't give more than one field in your progressive captures flows the same field id i.e h_custom_a. 

Equally because you don't know which parent category will be chosen, you don't know which conditional question (sub-category) question will be asked so again using the business process designer and update options will not be straight forward. 

I do think you have a couple of choices still.

* Add a custom field to your request from using the form designer (https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Request_Details_Form_Designer)

*  In the business process designer use the update request option, choose custom fields and then in the custom field which you have added to your request form use the variable picker to select All the progressive capture Sub Category questions, one after another using Inject not Overwrite

like this:

 [functions.pcf("Level_One","field2")] &[functions.pcf("Level_One","field_3")]

I say this because in reality only ONE of them will actually hold an answer depending on what the top level category the user has chosen 

Alternatively, you could use a decision node in your business process, which evaluates the top level category and then branches and you update the custom field with just the value from the specific sub category field depending on the top level category chosen 

So use a Requests > Get Request Info > PC Answers and the decision looks at the outcome to the top level question in your pc, and then in each branch outcome node you inject the variable which is the sub-category field value for each conditional field for the chosen top level category

 

I hope that all makes sense?

Just to add one more option in to the mix, if you wanted these options visible on the self service portal, rather than or as well as injecting them into custom fields which are not displayed on the self service portal you could Append them into the description field using the update request details option and choosing the Append option, which would add this to any other text in the description fields - below i have given them a title and then used the variable picker to inject the relevant progressive capture answers (of course to get the correct sub-category you might need a number of these nodes branching of the top level category chosen as we have shown above for updating the custom field)

Lots to consider but i hope this helps

Steve

[Daniel Nespoli]

Thank you @Steven Boardman and @Dan Munns for your advice and help. The detail you have both gone into is first class - thank you! It's much appreciated.

This is all quite new to me so it's a little confusing on the first read but I'm going to spend some time today exploring the options you've suggested and decide what works best for us.

I'll no doubt be in touch if I have any further queries!

Cheers again.

Dan