Since I’m waiting on my plan again to Raleigh from Newark, I wanted to share the following little example.

Just recently we had a new form that needed to be built and it had a small unique design situation. The form had an area that needed the ability to have multiple rows and a single total field. The repeating row had a large dropdown list and 6 more fields to be scrunched onto a single line and to be honest there wasn’t a way to do this gracefully with a repeating table. The designer and I had a quick IM/phone conversation about it and we decided to do it as a repeating table but also a repeating section and then we were going to have the client choose the one they wanted. Naturally she worked her magic and came up with the following examples. The “Reason” field will be the one turning into a dropdown list. The items for this field are going to have the length of 25 characters (just trying to draw a mental picture for you guys).

Repeating Table:


Repeating Section:

When the designer showed me the forms I couldn’t believe my eyes how much cleaner the repeating section was. I knew the client was going to love the repeating section and I was right. Big kudos to my designer for creating another great form and I’m sure there will be many more to come.

For this form we were totaling the “Amount of Deduction” field and were having the total appear in the “Total Amount of Write-Off” control. The “Total Amount of Write-Off” is an Expression Box control and not a regular field. The Expression Box control used “sum(fieldname)” formula. We use the Expression Box control because it’s a simple thing to setup and we don’t have to worry about storing the total value.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and comments are always welcome.