Form - Cross Linked setup

1 Overview

Cross Linked fields provide a very powerful way of building a parent child link, of allowing a parent form provide the contents for a child form.

This linking type is available to all Form types.

There are two Cross Linked form question types.

• Basic - Form Listing
• Basic - Form Search

The set-up is common to both, but the use is different in each case.

2 Common use examples

There are many uses for Form Listing and Form Search

Type	Title	Scenario
Form Listing	Frequently Changing Drop Down List	The child form needs a drop down list but there are frequency changes to the contents. Instead of modifying a List - Menu type frequently the contents are CDA records in a form which can be easily modified.
Form Listing	Quick product list	A child order form needs to lists some commonly sold / purchased products. For reporting purposes the pricing of the products can change. Keeping the details in the parent listing form is easier for title changes.
Form Search	Company and Contacts link	Many people can work for a company but how do you link them? In the Contact form, you add a Form Search type. Now you can look up the parent in the Company form. In this way you can link many contacts to one company.
Form Search	Company and Opportunities link	You have many companies. You have many opportunities. You need to link specific opportunities to specific companies. In the opportunities form, add a Form Search type and link it to the parent Company form.

These are just some examples. Form List is used for shorter volumes of records where Form Search can have 100s of thousands of records. Anywhere a parent child link is useful, a form cross linked question is useful.

2.1 Function

A cross linked type, will allow the contents of second form to be displayed / used in a parent form.

• The listing type will provide a drop down list of all the records in the second form. If you have more than 100 options consider using the search instead.
• The search type will allow a lookup to be performed on the parent form.

2.2 Worked Scenario

We have a form for events. In this form, we have a field where we want to keep which customer this event is for. The challenge is that the customer list changes often. We want to be able to give this to some other team to keep up to date.

So we build two forms.

A. Form [1] = Customer form. We add in name and any other fields we like. Most importantly we make sure the field mapping is set correctly and we carefully choose what our search fields will display. We add a few records into this form for testing purposes.

B. Form [2] = Event form. We build the event form as normal.

C. So we come to the point that we want in the Event form to store which customer the event is for. We could add a drop down list or similar but these are not dynamic and are not easily managed by another team. Instead we add a question into the event form of type "Basic - Form Listing" from the "Basic - Cross Linked Type" section. We call the question "Customer".

D. We need to tweak the Cross Linked field. So we "Answer Values - Modify". In the text and value for the question we add "intCDA_1_Id" without the double inverted commas. The 1 is the Id of the Customer form.

Now when we go into the form, the drop down list will contain all the test records we added in step A. The data displayed in the drop down list will be the search fields selected to display.

E. If however there are too many customer to display in a drop down list, you can change the type to "Basic - Form Search". This then provides a pop up lookup screen for locating the record desired rather than creating a very large drop down list.

If you would like to know any more about this functionality or how to customise it, please get in touch with your account manager or use the Help Me! button at the bottom of your bxp screen when you're logging into bxp.

3 Further Reading

There are also tools to help mass linking called Parent-Child linking tools Parent-Child_Form_Record_Linking