In most cases, if a field is conditionally hidden, the setting would be set to ignore data when hidden, and if a field is always hidden, the setting would be set to save data when hidden. To me, it sounds like when field rules are copied, you'd want to retain that concept of ignoring data in the conditionally hidden fields and saving data in always hidden fields. 

Kris, what kind of field rules are you dealing with where the rule should sometimes save data and other times ignore data? 

Hi Jared,

It is less about the specific field rules and more about designer workflow. 

I can fully appreciate the need to save the rules exactly as they were written when backing up a form or expecting a true copy. Hence asking for it to be optional.

However, there are a couple of use cases where that isn't the behaviour you want by default.

Firstly, if you work with a lot of hidden variables - based on current user, date/time submitted, lookups, calculated "staging" fields etc. When you copy a form, you are normally doing this to create the "next" stage of a process. Thus, you absolutely do not want your hidden variables being overwritten by default, and your preference would be for hidden fields to be ignored in the second form. I think someone at Laserfiche realised this early on, hence it potentially being the way it is.

Secondly, we've built 100's of processes using Laserfiche Forms and we don't build the forms that make up a process piecemeal. Instead we start by mapping out all fields, sections, pages, rules and lookups in a "master form". That way we can test field rule functionality to see that sections are hidden and shown across all "stages" of a process.

We then take that master form, make a copy, name it for that stage of the process, and then delete all of the irrelevant sections and fields. If you fix this "bug", we will be required to set field rules copied from our master form templates to ignore since every copy is always a derivative and thus should not overwrite the previous step's values when hidden.

Below is an example of where deep into a process, we only had to set one variable to save data, as the rest is in reference to values that were set in a previous step.

As mentioned earlier, I absolutely agree that we should have the ability to backup or copy a form 1:1, but I would certainly appreciate if there was the option to choose which behaviour is used at the time of copying since some of our "master templates" can have over 100 field rules which we'd need to change to "ignore" every time we make a derivative.

Thanks!