Conditional branching

[contenu]

Hi, I'm investigating your solution and am looking for the simplest way (in New mode) to hide or show form sections (tabs / accordeons) or individual fields, based on values in other fields. I have seen some of your samples in this forum, but don't want to have to create content types to enable this, nor am I a developer fluent in |avascript that can easily create these scripts myself.

I'm looking for a code snippet that can be used as a template, that is well commented and hence easy to adapt to any field/control combination. It seems that to enable configuration of 'conditional display' in the UI (instead of in the JavaScript window) would be very interesting to the majority of users interested in your product.

[Dmitry Kozlov]

Hi,

We were thinking about creation UI for conditional formatting, but there are too many cases of such conditions e.g. field values, current user, permissions, groups etc, so the UI would be very complex to use. And we decided that JavaScript is the best and most flexible option for creating dynamic forms. So we made JS-api that helps to make basic functionality without programming skills. You can find numerous samples in our blog, documentation and videos.

But we don't limit users with JavaScript only. Forms Designer provides rich group functionality which allows to create completely different forms for conditions based on field values, current user, date or SharePoint groups. These conditions works on the server side, so users will not see another form immediately when they have changed a field value, but after saving. Group functionality is very useful if multiple audiences with different permissions or roles work with the same list. It is also the case if you have workflows which modify status or other fields of items and you wish to show different forms for users based on the specific status and the user role.

You can leave questions related to your cases and we will find the best solution for you and will provide you with JS samples if needed.

[contenu]

In my opinion, you're overestimating the willingness of SharePoint users (beyond developers) to touch code. It is virtually zero, because it is just too time-consuming and too fragile. I appreciate when you say that there are many permutations of form logic to consider, but why not start with enabling in UI just one scenario that I think people need most of all: toggled visibility of a form field (or section) based on a value in another input field. So every object would show in the UI:

Object name

Visible (Y/N/Conditional)

Condition (queries only available input fields using plain language operators (e.g., is, is not, is greater than, is smaller than, contains, does not contain, etc)

The deeper customization you already offer through your Javascript framework can be used for more advanced customization, such as user identity based display, grouping etc etc. All fine. But at least offer the business analyst or advanced SharePoint user (whom I think are your primary target audience) some basic form logic that doesn't require them to touch code.

[Dmitry Kozlov]

Thank you very much for your detailed suggestion. It is very interesting case. We will consider it and I will inform you about our decision.