It would be nice to have the previous screen as a special value (like user and time) when using the Form Button. Eg, if you have a parent view with an inline list of children and a form button to create a new child, it would be nice to automatically associate the child with the parent view.
Forms have always worked this way — do you see the Columns section when you are adding to your Form? Scroll down.
Thank you. I misunderstood and the documentation is super helpful! Sorry for the bad feature request.
No! Feature requests for features we already have are the easiest to fulfill!
This sounds like exactly the scenario that I am looking to solve. That is, I need to provide a default value (from the “parent record”) to the “child record”. However, I am not seeing the “Columns section” available to me on my form. Is there some magic to turn this on? In case it’s important, I am navigating from my parent detail form -> child list form (via a List Relation) -> child add record form (via the + button). Thank you.
I’m not sure if you can add Columns in a List Relation screen. How about linking the parent to child via a link to screen action, then try to set up a form button for the new screen?
Thank you, Thinh. Sorry, but I’m not following. I added a button to my “parent form” and set it to “Link to screen” with my “child table” as the Data value. If I click the + control from this “child table” form, I still don’t see a “Columns section”. Am I doing something wrong?
A link to screen action is not a form button. Column values from the parent screen are only accessible on add/edit/form screens. If you are adding a child record in relation to the parent record, then you need to use a form button on the parent record.
Thanks, Jeff. It sounds like my desired form flow is not possible. The flow I am hoping for is: parent detail form -> child list form -> child add form (that includes Columns from parent). Assuming that’s not possible, I am thinking that if I want to retain this “form flow”, I would have to provide a Choice control on the “child add form” with each of the parent values and the user would have to select a value. Does that sound about right? Thank you.
Can you clarify what you mean by form? Are you trying to have an entry form within an entry form, or are you viewing a parent detail record in view mode, and you want to click a button to view a list of all the children, then add additional children? If so, you can either place a list of children on the parent detail record along with a form button to add, or you can place a link to screen button, pointing to “this item”, which is the same parent record, but instead of any parent details, you only put the children list on that screen along with a form button to add additional children records.
Hi Jeff,
Thank you so much for spelling out clearly my options. Your second option works almost perfectly for the form flow that I had envisioned. I replaced the List Relations on the “parent form” with the “buttons to this item” as you suggested. I have 2 different “children tables”, so I have implemented your solution twice on my “parent form”. There is now only 1 less-than-ideal UI/UX issues:
-> On the “parent form”, I want to display the count of the number of “child records” for a given parent. The count seemed to be accurate when I used the List Relations control. (I am using a Rollup column in my parent table.) However, for the “button to this item”, the count is wrong (it shows ALL records in the child table) for one of my child relations. However, when I navigate to the “children list form”, the correct number of records are displayed. Interestingly, the count for the other child table is correct!
I’ll play around with it some more. Worst case, I’ll just remove the count from the “parent form” for now. Really appreciate the help. Thank you.
I dropped and recreated the relationship and that seemed to resolve the count issue. All good on this one. Thank you, Jeff and Thinh.