Strategy for dependent or conditional form items needed

[bac mac]

Is it possible to display only items needed, triggered by particular checkboxes, while keeping remaining items tight without blank spaces.

In Filemaker Pro 11 I can certainly use conditional formatting to make certain items invisible, but instead, when these items aren't needed, I want the remaining required items moved up.

In actual practice, the full form spans several pages and unneeded sections could take up part of a page or span more than one page. The end result would be reduction in material to read when reviewing the submission and enabling better focus on the items requiring attention.

A simplified, abbreviated example would be something like:

Check procedures involved:

Chemicals _

Physical Hazards _

Instrumentation _

and dependent upon the responses, the user would additionally see it all displayed something like:

Check procedures involved:

Chemicals X

Physical Hazards X

Instrumentation X

Chemical types:

Acids _

Bases _

Flammable Reagents _

Physical Hazards:

Ultraviolet light _

Lasers _

Instrumentation:

Centrifuges _

Autoclaves _

and if they didn't check some of the items, they wouldn't even see questions related to that area (note the additional Physical Hazard questions are not presented since Physical Hazards is not checked, but the lower information moves up):

Check procedures involved:

Chemicals X

Physical Hazards _

Instrumentation X

Chemical types:

Acids _

Bases _

Flammable Reagents _

Instrumentation:

Centrifuges _

Autoclaves _

Thank you,

Bruce

[comment]

I can certainly use conditional formatting to make certain items invisible, but instead, when these items aren't needed, I want the remaining required items moved up.

This would be easy if each "item" were a separate record. Then you could omit it from the found set or remove it from a portal either by controlling what's related or by filtering the portal.

[bac mac]

The items are not separate records, they are text items and fields.

[comment]

The items are not separate records, they are text items and fields.

Yes, I understood that. What I am suggesting is to turn them into individual records in an Items table. Perhaps even several tables - It's hard to say without knowing what your solution is about.

[bac mac]

It will end up about 4 pages long once created- its a compliance form required for committee review about the experiments planned and for different projects only different subsets of the information are needed. Each subset it self will contain several fields of questions and answers, some text answers, some numbers, some yes or no. I'm trying to see if it is possible to have an initial set of checkboxes dictate which of those subsets appear.

[comment]

its a compliance form required for committee review about the experiments planned and for different projects

I'm afraid that's not much to go on. You are working with a database - and one of the rules is to atomize your data as much as possible. That means that "several fields of questions" will actually be several records in a Questions table. If the questions are divided into Sets, then you would have a table of Sets and a relationship linking a question to a set - and so on. This way you can have say a project linked to several sets of questions - and show only the items linked to the project.

[bac mac]

In the example below, with the data as entered, Check procedures involved = Chemicals and Instrumentation

then

The List Physical Hazards section should not appear and the List Instrumentation section should move up.

I'm not sure if this is possible.

Alternatively, I could go with conditional formatting and preventing entry of the Ultraviolet light or Lasers checkboxes if Physical Hazards is unchecked- that wouldn't be hard, but it wouldn't reduce the overall size of the final document.

I tried to upload the .fp7 file, but it said that I wasn't permitted to upload this kind of file. Here's what it looks like- four fields with checkboxes for each:

[comment]

I am not sure we are talking about the same thing. In a printed report, you can set some objects to slide up and reduce the enclosing part. This means that if a field is empty, it won't show up (but if you have a label next to the field, it will). Not sure how conditional formatting comes into this.

I still think your basic approach of putting everything in a single "form" is flawed.

---

P..S. You must zip a file before attaching it.

Edited July 27, 2011 by comment

[bac mac]

Right, conditional formatting is just my alternative- I could grey out sections but not accomplish sliding.

Is dependent removal or addition of sections possible? I'm open to suggestions?

Things I can think of include using different layouts, but there could be an excessive number of layouts so I'd prefer not to.

A portal was mentioned. Can a checkbox set or an equivalent appear through a portal?

Or what about a script- can a script dictate what appears and doesn't on a layout?

[comment]

Is dependent removal or addition of sections possible?

Yes - if the sections are records (or sub-summary parts, which comes down to the same thing). Otherwise no.

Same thing applies to a portal: each row of a portal is a record in a related table.