You can help users cope with complex information by guiding them to eligible values
in single-select fields.
Any tracker that manages real-world information will quickly become very complex.
Users can be confused by a proliferation of "Select" fields. Confusion can lead to
inconsistent data, which makes your job harder.
You can help relieve the complexity
by showing users their eligible options in a given field based on values they have
already selected in another field. You can create overlapping sequences of dependent
fields, with as many levels as you need.
This simplifies things for the user, but for the tracker administrator it can quickly
get complicated. So let's look at an example.
-
Click PROJECT ADMIN from the Project
Home menu.
-
Click Tracker Settings and create a tracker.
For this example, let's call it the Lunch Planning
tracker.
-
Create a single-select field and call it Lunch
type.
(For this example, we'll ignore the built-in fields, such as
Status and Assigned to. We're
just working with fields that you create.)
-
Create some values for the Lunch type field. Let's call
them Buffet, Picnic, and
Banquet.
Each type of lunch will make sense in some kinds of locations and not
others. For example, you would not normally plan a banquet lunch in a park.
We are now going to make it easy for users to avoid making such a
mistake.
-
Create a single-select field called Location type, with
Lunch type as the parent field, and give it some plausible
values.
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Start by adding an option called Beach. In the
Parent Values column, choose
Picnic, because that's the kind of lunch you would
have at the beach.
(The Parent Values column lists all the values
in the parent field you selected.)
-
Add a Restaurant. In the Parent
Values column, hold down the Ctrl
key and choose Banquet and Buffet,
because either of those could be held at a restaurant.
-
Create a single-select field called Location, with
Location type as the parent field, and give it some values
to choose from.
-
Start with an option called Happy Food Restaurant. In
the Parent Values column, select
Restaurant, because that's the type of location
that Happy Food Restaurant is.
-
Add another option, Hanalei Cove. Under
Parent Values, select
Beach.
-
Save your work and go to the tracker whose settings you have been
editing.
Try selecting from the interdependent values you have just created.
Observe that the value you choose in the
Lunch Type field
controls which values are available to you in the
Location Type
field, and that selecting a value in
Location type in turn
controls the values that appear in the
Location field.
- When a user selects Banquet for a lunch type, they can select
Restaurant but not Beach in the
Location type field. You will have less error
correction to do, and users will avoid confusion.
- When a user selects Picnic for their lunch type, the
Location Type field offers only Park
and Beach. Now you will not have to go through and clean up
after users who mistakenly choose to plan a picnic at Happy Food Restaurant, and
the doorman at Happy Food Restaurant will not have to turn away users who
mistakenly show up with picnic baskets.
Important: If you are used to defining your own Tracker fields, the ability
to make field values depend on other values may change how your trackers work in
ways you didn't anticipate. Keep these points in mind:
- Linking fields in this way doesn't modify existing data, but when users
later modify fields that are linked, they will have to adhere to the
relationships you set here.
- If a field has a parent, and that parent field also has a parent, the
top-most parent field must have at least one value.
- When a field has a parent field that is required, the child field's default
value is set to None. If that required parent field is
deselected, the child field no longer has to be required, but
Required remains the default.
- If you require a specific field value before an artifact can be placed in a
given status, that field's children are subject to the same requirements.
See Create a tracker workflow for more about
controlling what status an artifact can be in.
- If you delete a field that contains values that another field's values
depend on, the dependent field becomes a standard single-select field on its
own.
- When you cut and paste an artifact from one tracker to another, only those
field values that also exist in the new tracker come along with the
artifact. If those values aren't valid under the dependency rules of the new
tracker, they are still brought along.