When creating an app, you often want users to select predefined values from a dropdown. In many cases, you can use a basic Combo Field to accomplish this (without a spreadsheet), and you can specify each possible dropdown option by typing them into the Field’s definition (within the Wizard).
In other cases, however, manually typing the dropdown values into the wizard may become unwieldy. This is especially true when:
- You have lots of dropdown values.
- The dropdown values are likely to change.
- You have a series of dropdowns chained together from a filtering perspective. When a user chooses the value in one dropdown, the values in separate and secondary dropdowns should be filtered.
In these situations, you’ll want to prefer a Listcombo Field (tied to a spreadsheet) over a Combo Field. Instead of manually typing the dropdown values into the Field’s definition, you can configure the Listcombo Field to pull the values from an Excel spreadsheet. Maintaining the dropdown values in a spreadsheet will often be significantly easier.
In this tutorial, we’ll explain how to work with Listcombo Fields.
Note: In this tutorial, the words List and spreadsheet are used interchangeably.
Before We Start ...
This tutorial will assume your understand the following concepts:
Let's Get Started!
After you've correctly formatted and imported your List, we can use the Wizard to create some Listcombo Fields.
In this tutorial, we’ll use the spreadsheet pictured below to enter values for two Fields: area_of_law and matter_type.
1. Configure Your Listcombo Fields
To create a new Listcombo Field, Add a new Field in the Wizard and set its Type to Listcombo.
Select the name of your imported list in the List dropdown.
The Search Column dropdown will display a list of all the fieldLabels from your list. Select the fieldLabel corresponding to the data column you want used as your Field’s values. So for our area_of_law Field, we’ll select area_of_law as that’s also the name of the fieldLabel in our spreadsheet.
You must also select a fieldLabel from the Value Column dropdown. This will be the data displayed on the dashboard grid, typically the same fieldLabel used for the Search Column. In our example, we’ll select area_of_law for our area_of_law Field’s Value Column.
We will create two Listcombo Fields, one for area_of_law and another for matter_type.
2. Setting a Listcombo's Filter Properties
Similar to the Filter By property available for regular Combo Fields, we can also set a Listcombo Field to filter off the values of a separate field.
In our example, we’ll have our matter_type Field values filter off our area_of_law Field. To do this, we’ll select area_of_law from the Filter Column dropdown and the Filter By dropdown, where the former property refers to the column name in the spreadsheet, and the latter references the Field itself in the wizard.
Update your app.
Check it Out
And that’s all there is to it! Update your app and check out your new Listcombo Field in the launch form.
As you can see from the first screenshot below, when a user selects the area_of_law Field, the values that appear are pulled directly from our Excel spreadsheet:
After a user has selected a value from area_of_law, the values of matter_type are filtered accordingly:
Gotchas
- If you need to create more than one Listcombo Field which pulls values from separate spreadsheets, you'll need to create these Listcombo Fields one at a time and save your app in between.