When entering expenses and filling out the expense form, customers have a long list of Vendors that a person can choose from. However, not all vendors are valid selections for all of their subsidiaries, which is a field earlier on the form. The solution today is to build out multiple shortened vendor fields; one for each subsidiary. An example is attached in the screenshot. There are two problems with this solution:
- This solution doesn’t work well for inline entry of objects, which this customer uses. To allow for inline entry/editing it’s just not scalable to have all the different vendor fields in the view and to trust the user to fill out the right one.
- Reporting: when you want to report on vendor, you now have multiple vendor fields that could actually contain a value. All but one of them will be blank on any one expense. The only way I’ve found to get around this is to build a calculated field to essentially “funnel” the all of the different vendor fields back down to this one calculated field and then report on it.
The actual idea:
It’s kind of an evolution of display logic. The customer would like to be able to filter selection fields (dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons) based on choices made in previous fields. I don’t know if this would be built on the framework of the Typeahead filtering, or if it would be its own thing. But I think it would be a nice addition