Using Conditions and Rules

Overview

Field Rules or Conditional Rules allow you to show or hide a field based on a response to a previous field.  This is helpful when responses to certain fields are only applicable depending on the value of another field. For example, you may want to set a rule that if a user enters a phone number, you then ask them the “Best time to call?” 

Conditional rules are enabled from the form builder. If there is no rule set for a field, then it always shows. This is the default behavior for any new field. Once a conditional rule is enabled for a field, it will automatically stay hidden until the criteria are met to show it to the user. 

Setup

To turn on field rules, click the "Rules" button in the form builder on the field that you wish to optionally show. This button resembles two crossing arrows and is located between the Edit Field button and Delete Field button.  

Once this button has been clicked, you will be brought to a page that shows any existing field rules, or the message "This field doesn't have any conditional rules." Click the blue "Add Rule" button in order to create a new field rule.

Settings

Adding a new rule will bring up this screen:

You can now begin to customize the rule applying to that particular field, such that it will only show when the criteria you have set are met.

Fields	Description
All/Any	By selecting "All," it means all of the criteria have to be met in order for the field to show. By changing this to "Any," if you have multiple criteria, just one has to be met in order for the field to show.
Field	Select the field(s) a user responds to, whose responses, in turn, will impact whether this field is shown.
Condition	Here you can set the conditions for the responses to the previously set field.  You can set whether a user has to response exactly a certain way (is/isn't), whether a response contains or does not contain a certain word or phrase, whether a response starts with or ends with a certain word or phrase, whether a word or phrase exists or does not exist in the response, and whether a number response is greater than or less than a particular value.  For example, you may wish your field to show if and only if the response contains "neuroscience" or if the response is greater than 10.
Value	For fields with preset values (dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc), you can choose which value(s) will trigger the conditional field.  For open-ended fields (text boxes, etc), you can write in a particular value that must be entered by the user to trigger the conditional field.

You can add as many rules as you would like if the field should only be shown based on the response to several fields. For more information about the Filter Panel,  click here.

Deleting Rules

WARNING! If you need to make changes to rules, be careful if you are deleting or editing a field that is the primary field in a set of rules; i.e., other fields are shown or hidden based on selections made in this particular field.  If you do delete a choice in a parent field that is part of a conditional field setup, then the data contained in any dependent fields will be removed.

For example, the field 'Who is your favorite author?' is dependent on the field, 'What is your major?' and only shows if 'English' is selected as a major. If I were to delete the field 'What is your major?' I would lose the favorite author data. Thus, the system prevents me from deleting the field itself.

That being said, you can go into the field and remove the selection 'English.'  In this scenario, all the 'favorite author responses' will be cleared.