Showing one value in dropdown select menu, saving another value in the field

1

Thanks for a great community and broad documentation!

I tried to search an answer to this, but didn’t really find one. Is there a possibility to generate a dropdown menu that shows values represented in one form, but saves the chosen value in another form?

If I have the tables Persons, Participants and Seminars; for a seminar;

lets say the Seminars table looks like this:

image

If I open the Persons table, and for a given row press Expand row to open the modal with linked tables (subforms), I am able to enter all the seminars that person has attended, by choosing the seminar from the dropdown select menu linked to the Seminars table.

However, in the dropdown menu, I would like to see not only this, as values to choose between in the dropdown menu:

Sustainable development seminar
New methods
Old traditions

but rather this:

01.08.2018/Sustainable development seminar/Madrid
15.10.2019/New methods/Bergen
20.12.2019/Old traditions/Hjallerup

and still only the seminar name (linked to the seminar table) should be stored in the row field after having done the selection from the dropdown menu.

Having only the seminar title appear in the dropdown menu is too little info. It is handy to have also dates and cities in the listing of selectable elements, to be able to filter the dropdown selection better to narrow down the seletion when choosing the right element.

I am able to easily generate a column in the Seminars table with the concatenated values from Seminar + Date + City. How could I make the values shown in the dropdown menu to be generated from that column, while saving only the proper value from the Seminar column?

2

@Johan_Nyman heyy welcome to the community.

What displays on the dropdown is the ‘Display Column’ - this is indicated with a badge next to the column name. If you want to show a hybrid fo the Date, Seminar and City create a new column, perhaps [Seminar Badge] and set it to concatenate([Date],"/",[Seminar],"/","City"). Now set this new column as the Display Column. When you reference the table as a lookup, it will show this badge column as the select input. You will still be able to reference everything else in the table.

If you want to go further create a demo doc we can work in to solve the problem! Good luck :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

Thanks a lot Joseph @Johg_Ananda!

This was a simple and straightforward approach, that works well for me!

4

I realize that what this solution brings along, is that it is not possible to create new table values “on the fly”. With a select dropdown that refers to an original value in a table, it is very practical to use the “allow quick adding of new items” feature. Would there be a way around this; to be able to use the dropdown showing concatenated values from several columns (from an appointed ‘display column’), but still be able to get new values created for the list of items in the dropdown (quick adding of new items) without stepping away from the curren table view and losing context?

5

Yeah I know what you’re saying … this seems to be a limitation that you have to pick one or the other.

You may be able to hack this with actions and breaking apart what you ‘quick add’ … but thats for you to hack!