Guidance for dependent (cascading) drop down lists

[Gareth Cantrell]

We have a requirement for a process we we need to guide users to select certain values based on prior selections.

In other tools, we'd have configured a cascading (or dependent) drop downs for this, where the values of the child drop down change depending on the current selection of the parent drop down.

Hornbill doesn't offer this functionality, so I was wondering if there are any best practices or recommendations for achieving this in Hornbill?

[Steve Giller]

You can use Conditional Fields, although maintenance of these is a manual process so it depends on what you're trying to achieve.

[Gareth Cantrell]

I was thinking of conditional fields, however we have 15 options in the parent dropdown, so this would necessitate 15 fields for the dependent selections.

Additionally, the workflow would be quite nasty to find which of the 15 conditional fields had been selected to store in a custom field.

Which is why I was wondering if there was any other way to achieve this?

[Steve Giller]

16 minutes ago, Gareth Cantrell said:

Additionally, the workflow would be quite nasty to find which of the 15 conditional fields had been selected to store in a custom field.

It's clunky, but as the other 14 will be empty, you can do:

[captureVariable1][captureVariable2][captureVariable3]...[captureVariable15]

as the mapping and it will hold the one you need.

[Gerry]

@Gareth Cantrell

Out of curiosity, you mention you have done this in other fields, how did you approach it /or/ how did the other tool(s) allow you to implement this is a less-clunky way? I am interested to learn more about what you are trying to achieve, and where in Hornbill product you are trying to achieve it. 

Thanks
Gerry

[Gerry]

@Gareth Cantrell

"We have a requirement for a process we we need to guide users to select certain values based on prior selections."  If you mean, at the point of logging a new request, is this not what Intelligent Capture is intended for, that exact type of use case?

[Sam P]

This is part of our new starter request, it is time-consuming to set it up like this but works a treat.  Follow up with one Update Custom Field node in the Workflow like Steve describes and you can then use it however you need to.

One suggestion to maybe put forward to Hornbill is to have the ability to create IC templates (like you can Workflows) so that it is easier to replicate this setup across many different IC's meaning that you only have to do it once.

[Berto2002]

+1 we have the set-up exactly as above; user choses directorate and then we have manually created dependent lists, each it's own simplelist.

[Gareth Cantrell]

@Gerry When we used Jira, we had a field type that consisted of 2 drop-downs, with the available options in the 2nd drop-down controlled by the selection in the 1st.

The process we're trying to configure is not a typical service-desk capture, it is aimed at a small subset of users for a very specific security incident response process.

We could spin up a Jira project and configure it there, however that defeats the purpose of tracking requests and incidents in a single tool.

Since I raised this however, we've decided to rely on people correctly choosing the options based on what they've selected, rather than relying on the tool to prompt for the correct options  we're hoping that because it is a smaller group, it will hopefully be easier to control via training.

[Gerry]

@Gareth Cantrell

Thanks for the clarification, what you are trying to do is not unreasonable, its basically a hierarchical selection that your end user can drill down to get to a specific value? In Hornbill we have the notion of profile codes which does exactly that.  Can that not be used?

If we did have such a two-field "field" I am trying to understand where its data source would be.  Are these just a two-tier list of values defined statically against that field, in that form in that IC, or do you see this two-teird data set coming from the database so it can be changed dynamically, so like simple lists but with the notion of two-tier lists, or something else I am not thinking about?

Thanks for any clarifications you can offer, sorry of the questioning sounds dumb. Anyone else, feel free too to chime in 
Gerry