A Conditional Dropdown List is a list whose items depend on a selection from another field. The items that comprise the conditional dropdown list change depending on what a user selects in another list. For instance, imagine you're an HR manager in a multi-national company and you're responsible for designing an application that lets you store employee information. When your users enter employee records, you'd like QuickBase to filter the list of cities based on whatever is selected in the Country field.
The form you use to enter new employee records might look something like this:
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A conditional dropdown list is always a reference field created when you create relationships among tables. In the example above, there are really three tables and three relationships involved:
Employees table
Countries table
Cities table
When you establish relationships among your tables, QuickBase creates a number of reference and proxy fields in each of your tables. You'll see, in the tutorial that follows, that a reference field for City will be created in your Employees table after you have established the right relationships. This is the field you'll use to select a city for each employee. You'll tell QuickBase to make this field conditional, based on the selection of the employee's country.
(The forms above use the City and Country proxy fields, set up for the Related Country and Related City fields.,,but more about that later. Learn more about proxy fields.)
You make a field "conditional" using the Conditional Behavior field property. Because conditional fields must be reference fields, you'll see this property only when you're editing reference field properties.
Once you've turned on the Filter choices by selecting another field first property, QuickBase asks you to complete this statement which will specify the conditions for filtering the values in the dropdown. You'll need to select two fields, shown below:
Note that, in the example above, we've chosen proxy fields in the conditional dropdowns. When you're making selections in these dropdowns, you should be sure to choose the proxy field rather than reference fields. Reference fields may display a number, like a record ID. Proxy fields display values that are more useful to your users.
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