Form Builder: Rules
Rules are a special feature of the form builder that provides your forms with an additional level of functionality. It allows you to hide or show specific fields based on certain criteria and on preceding responses. For example, you may have a dropdown field with the options of A, B, C, D, or Other. If an applicant were to select "Other," an administrator can utilize Rules to have an additional one-line text box field called Other appear. This field would already exist on the form, but would be hidden unless Other were selected. This example demonstrates the most basic usage of Rules, but there are many other ways to use Rules to maximize the way your applicants interact with forms.
Creating a Rule Condition
In order to add a Rule based on particular fields, you need to have at least two fields added to your form and have saved that form. There should be the "If" field (e.g. If State = ___) and a "Then" field (e.g. Then show ___).
Once you have saved your form, you should access the tab of your form builder called Rules:
Initially, the Rules tab will look like this:
You will see the aforementioned "If" statement first, which will now be called a Condition. Below that, there are a series of "Then" statements, which will now be called Actions.
Let's start with the basic "If ___ = Other, Then show Other" example. In your Conditions section, locate your trigger field in the If Field dropdown.
Next, do we want the field selection to equal something, or to not equal something? In this example, we want the field selection to equal Other, so we will choose "Equals":
Finally, what do we want this field to Equal? Yes, "Other." This is what should be entered, manually, into the final textbox of this particular Condition.
Creating a Rule Action
Now that we have a Condition, it's time to add an Action. A brand new Rule will come with 3 actions by default, but you can add and remove Actions according to your needs.
When someone selects "Other" do we want a field to hide or a field to show? In this particular circumstance, we want a field that was previously hidden, to show. Thus, we will select "Show" from the first dropdown in the Condition.
When you select Show, you will see that the dropdown contains all other fields that are currently on your form so that you can choose the field in question from this dropdown. We will choose the one-line text box called Other.
For this particular example, we have now created both the Condition and the Action.
More Complex Rules
Note that any given Rule can have multiple Conditions, multiple Actions, or both. Where might we use multiple Conditions?
- You have a question that should be answered only by females in the state of New York. Thus, you would have a Condition " if="" gender="" equals="" to="" female"="" and="" a="" second="" condition="" "if="" state="" ny."<="" li="">You have a question that should be answered only by math OR science majors. Thus, you would have a Condition "If major equals to math" and a second Condition "If major equals to Science." At this point, you would look towards the Condition Match field.
If the Condition Match field is set to "And" it means that ALL of the Conditions must be met in order for the Action(s) to be activated; we would use this for the female in the state of NY question above.
If the Condition Match field is set to "Or" it means that ANY of the Conditions must be met in order for the Action(s) to be activated; we would use this for the Math or Science major example.
In order to add fields to accommodate these multiple Conditions, you should use the Add Condition button; likewise the Add Action button to add an Action.