Re: Any Method to check within a record for 'not null' options?

[Doug Blair]

** Hi... A subject dear to my heart!  See my presentation called QandA from the 2004 BMCUW in DC! I would do this with three forms and a join form.   A form containing questions (and for more elaborate scenarios, a flag for the type of expected answer: integer, character, yes/no, date etc) A form containing the topics to which the questions may be relevant (this might be your service catalog or a list of things the user could ask for) A form linking which questions are related to which topics (this allows you to have an arbitrary number of questions associated with an arbitrary number of topics). This can be a two-column list with the Request ID (or GUID) from the topic and from the question in the same record. A JOIN of tables 1 and 3, and a second JOIN of the first with table 3. In this last compound JOIN table you will have the topics and only the questions related to that topic. That's both the minimum and complete set of questions. Typically once you select a topic (service catalog item?) you might have only 5 or 10 questions out of 20 to deal with. Notice that you could take this idea a couple layers further... service catalog item joined to questions joined to possible answers for each of the questions. If you are willing to coach your users through editing rows in a table you could just display a table based on the compound join with an extra editable column next to the question. When they pick an answer, push the question and the answer to a response table. One table refresh to populate the questions, one push per answer. Seems pretty efficient to me. You could also guide the user to click each row in the table and copy the question to a secondary field, where you would collect and submit the answer. More clicks, though. You could also save the push to the end and do a table walk of responses under a SUBMIT button... Might we see you at WWRUG11? I'd love to talk about this stuff. Should be pretty easy to find me. Doug Blair On Aug 28, 2011, at 3:12 AM, Shiju John wrote: Hi, I have a generic issue. The issue is as described below: I have a form which stores 20 questions. These questions are not mandatory, and the user might answer any "n" questions out of this 20. I need to do a customization such that i need only the questions answered to be pushed to a new form, which segregates each of these "n" questions to "n" records in the new form. The basic and easiest approach would be to create 20 activelinks which checks if each question is answered or not, and based on that do a push to the new form. But this would degrade the performance as there are chances that the number of questions might increase in future. And this approach would be a hard code( method of implementing 20 active links) , and not configurable. Could some one suggest me a better approach to do this? Please pour in your thoughts !!! :) Thanks, Shiju. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are" Doug -- Doug Blair d...@blairing.com +1 224-558-5462 200 North Arlington Heights Road Arlington Heights, Illinois 60004 ITILv3 _attend WWRUG11 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_