You are viewing limited content. For full access, please sign in.

Discussion

Discussion

I'm Not Sure How to Accomplish This...

Forms
Updated July 7, 2020
posted on July 2, 2020

Okay, so to give this question some context:

I have a fairly large form that I'm building for whenever our employees have a qualifying change event and need to make changes to their benefits. My plan is to have them fill out the first page with the details of the event and what changes they want to make, and based on those responses, make other pages on the form appear that they will be required to fill out. Each page is essentially a digital version of an existing paper form that we have today.

Since so many of the forms require the same personal info for you, your spouse, and/or your dependent (first, middle, last, DOB, SSN, & sex), what I'm trying to do is create another page titled "Personal Information" where they enter all of this information for themselves, their spouse, and their dependents, and then use that information to pre-populate all of the other corresponding fields on the form so they don't have to do any duplicate entry.

This is super easy to do for self and spouse, since there is only one of each, but for children/dependents, I'm struggling to determine how best to do that, and would love some advice if anyone has any.

The goal is to have them select how many dependents they need to make changes for (either via a collection where they can add as many as needed, or a drop down where they can select 1-6 and based on that selection, show the corresponding fields based on a field rule), and then add that information for each dependent. Then, later on in the form, if they only need to add one of those four dependents to a plan, for example, they could type in one field (I'm thinking either SSN or first name), and then based on that, it would populate the rest of the information for that individual.

I've tried building out multiple ways of accomplishing this but keep realizing a flaw in my design when I go to try building the formulas to populate the data.

If anyone has any thoughts on how to accomplish this, I'd love to hear them! This has been stumping me for days and I thought it was finally time to ask for some help :) Thanks everyone!

0 0
replied on July 2, 2020

It's been a while, but I have some similar experiences. I handled it by saving that basic info and using Workflow to write it to lookup tables to then be used by the other forms in the process.

This can be done modularly--one Forms process to store the data and one or more that work with it--or by moving on to a user task after the save. If users have at least a participant license, the user task can be assigned to the initiator and you can automatically load the task after it saves. Using Forms portal for users without their own licenses would require separate processes.

When adding dependents, you could first have them select from a list of the dependents they've already defined, then lookup up the rest of their info for the other fields. And you could do this within a table or collection so they can add multiple dependents.

Of course, you'll need to ensure that people don't see each others' lookup details, which requires a little more thought if separate processes.

0 0
replied on July 7, 2020

Pieter, thanks for the response! If I had a bit more time to build this process and if every one of our employees had a license, that definitely sounds like a viable solution. Unfortunately only a handful of our employees (those who approve and initiate forms) have licenses, so I don't believe that would work. 

One of these days if/when I ever learn how to use Workflow though, that does sound like a much more elegant solution. For now though, I think I'll just end up having them re-enter their dependents' info, as inefficient as that is. I can't think of a way to do it solely within one form. I do appreciate you taking the time to respond though!!! Have a great day Pieter!

0 0
replied on July 2, 2020

Hi Dylan,

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't need to display all the data on the form to them twice, and you don't need to make the submission form the same layout as the final version that's saved. You can have a different form that saves using "current process data" and populate all of the duplicate fields with the default value of the other variable, and then on the submission form you can only show the info you need to collect and can change the layout as needed.

0 0
replied on July 2, 2020

Thanks for the response Jim! I'm aware that that is a possibility, but as we're planning on taking this process and copying it with some modifications to create our open enrollment process for this year, I'm trying to keep things as familiar as possible for our employees while still introducing the huge time savings that an electronic open enrollment process will bring. I still wouldn't know how to achieve what you suggested with multiple dependents though, as I mentioned previously. That's the main piece I'm struggling with currently.

0 0
You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Sign in to reply to this post.

Details
Related Posts
Loading ...