I’m building a project and have a number of organizational “pillars”—key areas that our marketing team supports (Membership, Annual Meeting, Publications, and Education). I have a custom field to select which pillar a particular campaign supports. I’d also like to have a “sub-pillar,” as each area has some primary initiatives within it (e.g., Member onboarding, recruitment, renewals; Meeting submissions, registration promotion, post-event promo). That sub-pillar list is kind of long, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to have it set up so that only specific values are valid based on the the Pillar field selection (so, e.g., if the pillar is Membership, the sub-pillar can only be one of the appropriate values).
My thought for a workaround on this would be to have users specify the sub-pillar, and then use a rule to set the pillar field value, but I’m curious if there’s a way to configure the sub-pillar field to show a subset of its available values based on the pillar field selection.
To my knowledge, there is not a way to limit the options in a custom field based on the selection in another field. Others here may have some thoughts on that.
Here are a few options:
You can have a rule that would add a comment and clear the sub-pillar field if someone selects something that is not valid based on the pillar field. The comment could state the valid options for the pillar selected.
Another option is to have a single custom field for the pillar and sub-pillar. I understand this would be a long list. It would have options something like: Membership: Member Onboarding, Membership: Recruitment, etc.).
Have a different custom field for each group of sub-pillars. So something like Pillar with the options of Membership, Annual Meeting, etc. Then Membership Sub-Pillar, Annual Meeting Sub-pillar, etc custom fields with only the options related to each pillar. This might be a bit clunky visually as it creates more fields. You could setup different views in the project for each pillar then hide the columns not needed for each pillar. This one really depends on your workflow.
The last option, and I am kind of partial to this one, is color code your pillars and sub-pillars, with all the sub-pillars in a single custom field. So if Membership is blue, then all the sub-pillars related to Membership are also blue. Along with with this, if Membership is listed first, then all the sub-pillars related to Membership are also listed first. This will keep things a bit more organized visually.
Hope these are helpful. Let me know if any of these work for you and your workflow.
Thanks for these thoughts, Ron. This gives me enough info to develop something that will work for us. I think I’ll need to keep separate fields—we use the pillars for high-level organization—but having the sub pillars match the color is a great idea to help ensure that a quick visual inspection will catch any outliers.