04. Using the Cascading Selects Question Type

Introduction

Often in a form there are situations where the choices for question #1 changes what options are shown in #2 and so on in a cascading fashion. (It is termed “cascading” because choices in a question follow from the question immediately before it.)

A common example is the selection of a country, then a state/province in that country, then a city in the chosen state or province - where the choices are restricted to save field officers’ time and reduce errors. While you can achieve this effect by using single select questions and logic, that approach is very time consuming and can easily exceed the maximum question count limit when hundreds or thousands of choices are involved.

TaroWorks solves this issue by providing the Cascading Selects question in the form builder. The user first import a CSV file with all the choices, then add a Cascading Selects question into the form.

Getting Started

You must first upload a comma separated value (.csv) file to define the levels and choices to use in a Cascading Selects question. For more information on this step, please see Creating and Uploading an Options list for Cascading Selects.

How to Add a Cascading Selects Question

1. Edit an existing draft form or start a new one. Go to the Question Builder tab.
2. On the left margin, click Cascading Selects (red arrow) to add the question to the bottom, or click and drag it to insert into your form.
   
3. Enter a Caption. Add Supporting text and check Required as desired.
4. In the droplist Cascading Selects (green box), select the list you want to load for this question.
5. Click Save to save the section.

Notes

• If you plan to have multiple cascading select questions in the same form, the number of cells in all the .csv imported should be less than 10,000 to stay under salesforce.com processing limits. You may need to break up the form into multiple forms.

Scoring

• Scoring is not available for Cascading Selects questions.

Logic

• You can set show/hide logic for a Cascading Selects questions as normal.
• However, a Cascading Selects question cannot be used as a condition for other questions.

Field Mapping

• Compatible field types for mapping are: 
• Text;
• Text Area;
• Long Text Area; and, 
• Rich Text Area
• Each level of a Cascading Select question can be mapped to a field. In the example below, a csv file with 3 levels (Class, Family and Species) have been loaded. 
  
• If any levels in a Cascading Selects question is mapped to a required field, the question would be set as required as normal. This also makes other levels in the same Cascading Selects question required. Please take this into consideration as your create your csv table. 
• For more, please refer to the Question-Field Mapping Compatibility Table.

Passing Values through Hierarchy Drill Down

• It is not possible to pass values from fields in the Hierarchy Drill Down into a Cascading Selects question.