I can elaborate some. Terri and I are working on the same form. On the form in question, there is a lookup. The criteria for the lookup is the very first field on the form "Application ID" and it's a required field. The set of fields that the lookup is supposed to fill in do not show up on the form until around page 3 and they are just single line text fields that hold first name, last name, department ect. The fields that are filled in by the lookup are also required fields. When the form is launched, the form opens on page 3 and has focus on the first required field returned by the lookup. The expected and wanted behavior is for the form to open on page one and have focus on the very first required field in the form, which is also the criteria field for the lookup. The way it is now, the form opens, focus is briefly put on the first field, page one but a micro second later focus jumps down to page 3 "First Name" field.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for explaining in more detail. The crux of your issue is that the lookup is running when the page loads with an empty string as its parameter - since nothing is returned, it then tries to write blank values into the return fields. Required fields don't accept blank values as valid, so the invalid input focus code is triggered.

I think in this case you can utilize Field Rules to achieve the desired behavior. Try setting up the following, which will cause the Page 3 lookup-filled fields to be hidden (and un-required) by Forms onload:

As soon as a value is entered for the lookup criteria of Application ID, they'll show up and be required.

Something else you could do is have the lookup populate a set of non-required permanently hidden fields mirroring First/Last/Dept/etc., and have JavaScript triggered by an onchange event that writes the input of each of those fields into its visible and required counterpart if the input is not an empty string.

To protect against actual null or blank values that may be in the database you're doing lookups from, you might also want to replace the lookup with a stored procedure like the one below and call the stored procedure from Forms instead.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[MyStoredProcedure] @applicationID nchar(9)

AS
BEGIN
	SET NOCOUNT ON;

    -- Insert statements for procedure here
	SELECT [first_name_column] AS firstName, [last_name_column] AS lastName, [department_column] AS department
	FROM [dbo].[Table]
	WHERE [application_id_column] = @applicationID AND [application_id_column] IS NOT NULL AND [application_id_column] != ''
END