Summary Fields

Overview

The Summary Field is a field in the Form Builder that allows you to summarize data from a linked child form.  For example: On the Companies form, summarize count of related contacts from the Contacts form.  Or, on the Applications form, summarize the average review score from the Reviews form records for that Application.

Preconfiguration

A Summary Field is one of the specialty fields that exists in the Form Builder.

If this field is grayed out for the form that is being edited, this means that the preexisting conditions have not yet been met in the workspace - namely, that there are no child forms linked to the form being edited. 

As stated in the Overview, this field type is designed to summarize child data when there is a linked parent-child relationship via a linked form. Summary fields are always added to the parent form. (For more information about form relationships and linked forms, see the article Linking Forms.) 

If you are editing a form in which this relationship does not yet exist, you will not be able to utilize the Summary Field.  For example, if you are utilizing a company form and a contact form, you would first add a linked field on the contact form back to the company, so that one company can have many contacts. Then from the company form, you can enable the summary field.  

Setup

Once a linked relationship has been created, you can add the field to your form (see image below):

From the dropdown next to Please choose a linked form which you'd like to summarize, select a linked child form. In the example used here, this is the Contacts form, as we are looking to summarize how many contacts a company (parent form) has.  

Note that once you have chosen a linked form here, it cannot be changed once the form edits are saved. You will have to delete the field and recreate it in order to make a change.

Once you select your child form, the following settings will appear.

In the dropdown menu next to "I want to know the", you can select from the following summary options:

• Average (of a particular calculated field on that child form)
• Total Count (of number of child form records linked to the parent form record)
• Maximum (of a particular calculated field on that child form)
• Median (of a particular calculated field on that child form)
• Minimum (of a particular calculated field on that child form)
• Sum (of a particular calculated field on that child form)

Note that all summary options will calculate data for only those child records linked to the parent record. 

If a summary option other than Total Count is chosen (i.e., Average,  Maximum, Median, Minimum, or Sum), an additional configuration field will appear labeled "of data in". Because these summary options calculate the numerical value of a particular field on linked child form records, the next step is to designate which field contains the data that should be summarized.

The Summary field in the image below will calculate the total amount purchased across all linked  records from the Contacts form.

An optional filter can also be added to the Summary field. Setting a filter will configure the Summary field to only summarize data from linked child records that meet the filter conditions which are set. For example, if you only wanted to included linked child records that are completed, the filter Draft is False would accomplish this goal. (A newly-added Summary field will have this filter condition set by default.)

Select the Filter icon to bring up the Filter tool in a pop-up window:

When you have set up filters (where applicable), you can close the field and Save Form.

You can also select the dropdown menu next to this icon and choose All if you wish the Summary field to include information for all linked child records.

Note that a maximum of 30 summary fields can be added to each form.

Also, note that there is a limit of five linked summary fields to one another in progression, or cascaded.  In other words, just four successive summary fields can be created (in which a form serves as a parent field for one but is the summary field of another).  If you are trying to add a summary field and receive an error message, you may have too many cascaded summary fields linked to one another.

Advanced Options

Under the field set up, you have the option to access Advanced Options.

When you click See advanced options at the bottom, you will see a section labeled Formatting Options.

Here, you can customize the format of the number (the mean, total, sum, etc of the fields you indicated in Setup).

You can limit the number of Decimal Points to 0 through 8 decimal points.

You can also opt to set the number to currency if the fields being summarized are also currency fields. 

When you check off "Set number to currency," you will be given a dropdown with each country's currency. Select the one that matches the child form fields being summarized.

Viewing Summary Fields in the Data View

When you have saved the form containing your newly set up summary fields, you can view the summarized results in the data view by turning these fields on using the Show/Hide Columns menu. (For more information about this feature, see the article Working with Columns and Views [Show/Hide Columns].)

In the example below, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th columns are all Summary field data.

Note: There can sometimes be a delay in displaying the results of the summarized data.  Occasionally, this will mean that the user will need to refresh the browser page a minute or two after adding the field.