Form Rules

What’s the difference between a chicken and a dog? Among other things, you can’t train a chicken, while dogs are quite trainable. If you’re skeptical, try teaching your chicken to sit on command or herd sheep. Better yet, get a team of chickens to pull a sled in the Iditarod. The Forms application is much more like the dog than the useful (southwestern omelet anyone?) but untrainable chicken, and it’s only getting more trainable as time passes.

Form rules are a good example of the trainable nature of the Forms application. With form rules, you can train your form fields to behave as you wish. There are several things you can make them do:

Show/hide

Based on a predefined condition, set the visibility of a form field.

Enable/disable

Use a predefined condition to enable or disable a field.

Require

Use a predefined condition to make a field required.

Jump to Page

Based on user input, skip over some form pages directly to a relevant page.

Autofill with Data Provider

Use a data provider to populate fields when a condition is met in another field.

Calculate

Populate a field with a calculated value using data entered in other fields.

Form rules are for changing fields and form elements by acting on conditions.

If [condition] do [action].

If you’re not already familiar with the Forms application, start here. Once you know how to create forms, add and configure fields, and then publish forms, come back here and learn about form rules.

The Anatomy of a Form Rule

Each rule consists of one or more conditions and actions.

Conditions determine whether any actions are executed.

Actions determine what happens if the condition is met.

Rules are stored in the database in JSON format by default.

Creating Form Rules: Rule Builder

Once you create a form and lay out its fields, you’re ready to set up rules in your form:

1. Save the form.

2. Open the Rule Builder by clicking the Rules tab at the top of the Edit Form screen.

3. In the rule builder view, you can now begin developing your form rule. Click the Add button () to get started.

Figure 1: The Rule Builder gives you a handy interface for creating dynamic form rules.

Before looking at each type of rule condition and action you can use to develop rules, consider the OR selector box at the right side of the Condition (it’s grayed out and unusable at first). You can choose OR or AND here, depending on what relationship the conditions should have with the action.

OR

The action is triggered if any of the conditions you specify evaluates to true

AND

The action is triggered only if all the conditions you specify evaluate to true

This box becomes usable once you click the Add button () to add an extra condition.

Conditions

Conditions are the gatekeepers of form rules. If the condition’s if statement evaluates to true, the action is triggered. If it evaluates to false, no action happens.

A condition checks whether one field’s value

• Is equal to a specific value or another field’s value.
• Is not equal to a specific value or another field’s value.
• Contains a specific value or another field’s value.
• Does not contain a specific value or another field’s value.
• Is empty. This assumes you want to do something if a field is empty.
• Is not empty. This assumes you want to do something as long as a field is not empty.

One exception to this is the User condition, which is the last option in the Condition dropdown menu.

The User condition doesn’t act on a field at all. It checks whether a User belongs to a certain role. For example, if the condition

If User belongs to Administrator

evaluates to true, an action is triggered.

A condition is the gateway into a form rule, but actions define what actually happens when the condition evaluates to true. The remaining articles discuss the available actions and demonstrate their use.