I’m currently trying to design an order submission form to be used as a mobile app so that construction workers can submit an order request from site for items that they require. This is currently up and running and will email our office when submitted in a format that we can just forward onto the supplier.
Currently the order needs to be typed in the ‘Items required’ box then be submitted. However, I want to enable items to be selected via dynamic dropdown boxes (I know how to set this bit up), but then added to the ‘Items required’ field as text when pushing the add button (which I’ve added to the image below myself).
Does anyone know if there’s a way I could do this? I want it so it just adds each item to the field one by one and doesn’t submit anything until the submit button is pressed after the user has finished selecting all their items for the order.
Phil, not 100% sure I understand but it sounds like you’ve been putting items for orders into that text field, and what you really want is to be able to create a bunch of item records that are connected to an Order record.
So create a child table called Items that is connected to the Orders table (Orders is parent, Items is child). Then make a detail page for the order that is structured like this:
An edit form for the Order record at the top
In the middle of the page, a table showing Item records linked to this order.
At the bottom, an add-record form that allows you to add a linked Item.
I do something very like this in a to-do app, where Notes are children connected to Tasks. Task fields at the top, the list of connected note records in the middle, and a simple add-note form at the bottom. Would something like this work for you?
NOTE that I have a Memo field in my screenshot. You should probably ignore that as it might not be pertinent to your design problem.
In addition to William’s excellent suggestion would a multi-select field work for you? I believe you can set it to select as many items as needed and they will all be included in one field.
Another option which I am about to implement is using Integromat (Make) using a text aggregator. See this blog post here.
Many thanks for your suggestion and the detail you have gone into. This wasn’t exactly what I was looking at, but could certainly work and I’ll definitely look into it.
The way I saw it in my head, was the the user would select an item (which could be on an child table), then when selected it would copy the text of this item into a paragraph text field, then the user would be able to select another item which would be added onto the list in the paragraph text field. I can see this being something not possible in Knack, or at least not with some coding knowledge, so your solution sounds like it may be the way to go.
Hi Peter, Thanks for this. Do you mean the multiple choice field with multiple selections selected in the settings?:
If so I’ll certainly look into it, as the order would be made up of many items so it may be a good way to make it more efficient.
Using Integromat is something I wanted to look into at some point so it may be worth trying that now if it could be useful. I’m not really sure what the possibilities are with it, so it would be could to get my head around it.
This Orders App how-to guide covers this topic in a pretty simple format. I recommend building a test app using this guide and then applying the concepts to your app.
It uses the concept of an Order to which you add individual Order Items (Line Items). You really can’t use a method (easily) in which you choose many items from one field with the Order record.
