There are many situations where one drop-down field should change its values in response to a value selected in a different drop-down field. This is now easily achievable thanks to our new feature.
In the past, users had to work around this feature limitation by adding multiple drop-down fields and using Visible formulas to determine when each one was shown. This made apps more complicated to write and maintain. Now, the Values property can be directly set to an array.
To demonstrate this, here’s an app that lets users select a country in North America. The province drop-down field changes its values in response to the country selection:
The app features three named value, UsStates, MexicanStates and CanadianStatesTerritories. Here’s the start of the value of UsStates:
Here’s the formula of the value of the province text drop-down field:
States", UsStates, "Mexico", MexicanStates)SWITCH(Country; "Canada"; CanadianStatesTerritories; "Unites
States"; UsStates; "Mexico"; MexicanStates)
This formula uses the SWITCH formula function, but you could also use IF, IFS and CHOOSE.
Canadian provices are either states or territories. In recognition of this, the associated drop-down uses a label that changes depending on the selected country:
Drop-downs whose values are calculated dynamically by default don’t have a default value. That means that when the country changes, no state or territory is selected.
This app assigns a formula to the InitialValue property to ensure that the first value is selected:
The formula above uses the
Item formula parameter to access the field the property is
associated with, State. In this case, we could also have
written State to reference the
State text drop-down field.
For additional sample InitialValue formulas, refer to this blog post.
Note: Named values are not available in our Starter plans. You can work around this limitation by copying and pasting the formulas of named values to take the place of their names in other formulas referencing them.