Table of Contents
Overview
How to Do It
Update Field Validation
Toggle Field Value
Questions with Nested Fields
Limitations
Related Articles
Overview
Templates in Academic Scheduling, Curriculum Management, and Online Catalogs include the ability to add “Actions” to most fields via its “Question Settings”.
Actions are composed of conditional statements that can be used to update the value or configuration of the selected field.
You can add multiple actions to a field.
Actions are not triggered until a request/proposal or direct edit has occurred. In other words, if you add an action to your Section Template, for example, no sections will reflect that action until that section is edited (or edits are requested).
To add actions to fields in Academic Scheduling, go to Settings > Templates > Section Template.
In Curriculum Management, you can configure actions for fields in three places: Settings > Course Template; > Program Template; and Forms > (Select Desired Form).
In Catalogs, you can configure actions for fields at Settings > Page Templates.
How to Do It
Step 1:
To configure the action for a given field, click into it.
This will open the field’s “Question Settings”.
Step 2: Scroll to the bottom of Question Settings and click “+ Add Action”.
Step 3: Click into the below box to configure the action.
Step 4: Configure the logic (condition, any of, all of), and other parameters (explained below).
FIELD GROUP –
“Form” includes questions on the form that do not contain reference values.
“Form (Reference fields)” includes questions on the form that do use reference values.
FIELD – Allows user to select a field within the form
REQUIREMENT – Allows user to define logical condition.
VALUE–
Allows user to define value to evaluate condition.
Note if the question type is Yes/No, the value you input here must be “true” or “false” in order for the action to work. The action will NOT work if you use “Yes” or “No” as the value.
Note
- If you’re building a condition based on a partOfTerm, rather than using the Display Name for the Part of Term, you should instead use the number it is within the display order at Scheduling > Settings > Terms > (Select Term).
- If the relevant part of term is listed third, for example, then the condition would say “Subterm is 3”, regardless of its display name. If the relevant part of term is listed first, then the condition would say “Subterm is 1” (shown below).
- Watch a video of how to set this up.
Step 5:
Update Field Value | Update Field Config | Update Field Validation | Toggle Field Value
Select the impact of the action from the “then” dropdown menu.
You will see at least three options: “update field value”, “update field config”, or “update field validation”.
A fourth option, “Toggle Field Value,” is also available in some instances.
A breakdown of all four options is below.
Update Field Value
Use this to automatically define the field’s value whenever the specified condition is met.
When determining what you want to update the field value to, click the dropdown in the “Dynamic Field Value” modal and then use the scrollbar to view options.
You can also use this action to configure the value for one field to be the same as the value for another field (e.g. Have the long title of a program auto populated with the short title). Learn how to set that up here.
Update Field Config
Change whether the field is required as well as who can edit and/or view.
In Curriculum, you can also use “update field config” to configure actions/logic (in pre-built select fields with a dedicated merge) to limit which options downstream-users see based on other selected fields in the template. Learn how that works here.
The below example shows an action that updates a field’s settings using “Update Field Config”.
Update Field Validation
This allows you to add a validation message when a certain condition is met.
For example: If the Section Template includes fields for "Campus" and "Location," we can add a field validation that says if "Campus" contains "Online" and "Location" contains "Physical," then update the "Location" field validation to display an error message: "This field is invalid! If the campus is online, the Location cannot be set to "Physical."
In Scheduling, best practice is to rely on Section Rules – rather than Section Template “Field Validations” – whenever possible, as the Rules functionality is more robust. You can learn more about setting up Section Rules here.
See the “Update Field Validation” section below for more details on how to set this up.
Toggle Field Value
Use this option to define which fields are selected and deselected in a select field.
This option will only be available for multi-select fields wherein “Allow multiple select” is checked and multiple options have been defined.
See the “Toggle Field Value” section below for more details on how to set this up.
Step 6 (Optional):
Click “+ Add Effect” to add an additional effect.
In other words, if you define an action/condition (“if”), there can be multiple results (“then”).
Step 7: Click “Save”.
Update Field Validation
Overview | How to Do It | Field Validation Error
Overview
You can use the “Add Actions” option to set up field validation (it’s one of four options under Step 5 above).
How to Do It
Step 5a: Follow all of the steps outlined above, but when you get to Step 5, ensure you’ve selected “Update Field Validation” from the dropdown.
Step 5b:
In the “To” field, click “Change Custom Validations”.
This will trigger a “Dynamic Field Validation” modal to appear.
Step 5c: Click “Add Custom Validation Rule”.
Step 5d: Input the desired message into the “Error Message” field.
Step 5e: Click “Close” to close the modal.
Field Validation Error
If a user navigates to the section editing modal and violates the custom validation rule you defined in the template, they will see the following and will be unable to save the section. The user will need to click in the applicable field — "Location" in this instance — for the validation to trigger.
Toggle Field Value
Overview
You can use “Toggle Field Value” to define which fields are selected and deselected in a select field (it’s one of four options under Step 5 above).
How to Do It
Step 5a: Follow all of the steps outlined above, but when you get to Step 5, ensure you’ve selected “Toggle Field Value” from the dropdown.
Step 5b:
In the “To” field, click “Preview or Change Effect”.
This will trigger a “Dynamically Modify Selected Options” modal to appear.
Step 5c:
Click into the dropdown to access/select three options:
Toggle – Toggles which options are selected.
Add Only – Adds selected options.
Remove Only – Removes selected options.
There might be cases in which users want multiple actions to control the options selected in another field. In these cases, users should utilize the “add only” and “remove only” toggles to not override all selected options, which is what the “toggle” function would do.
Step 5d: Use the second dropdown to select which option(s) should be impacted.
Step 5e: Click “close”.
Questions with Nested Fields
Learn more about how actions work in Questions with Nested Fields in Curriculum here and here.
Limitations
If you use Actions to make a field visible only if certain conditions are met, the field will not show up as a column option in the dashboard view.
Cross-listed courses can only be used in actions so long as the action is “is empty” or “is not empty”.
Cross-listed courses cannot be used in actions when the action is “contains XYZ” or “is named ABC” and other data-specific actions.
This is because the cross-listed course field only has access to the courseID of the cross-listed course. For a cross-list look up, we are not gathering the course details.