Multi-Select Elaboration

[nickboom]

Feature request unless there is a way to accomplish this already that I am missing (other than creating 15 fields which gets very noisy)

In building a database to track numerous testing events would like to keep track of the required instrumentation to accomplish that test. The instrumentation has the attributes of: type, number required, and required sample rate. The types of available instrumentation are fixed, but the number & sample rate could be anything depending on the test. So right now I have a multi-select that looks like this:

and a notes field after it where people can further elaborate. It would be nice to force people into entering information consistently, so in a perfect world I would have a single field where the muliti-select options can be selected and then if picked, sub fields would open up in which to input the sub-attributes. Something that would provide the implied functionality like this:

Very open to suggestion from folks as to a clean way to accomplish this without creating a very wide table with many fields.

Thanks!

[Jonathan_Letts1]

You could create another table and use a linked record. You’d still need to create all the iterations in that table, but it wouldn’t be quite as messy…

[nickboom]

I thought about doing this but decided not to, as the instrumentation builds are specific to the test event records. Spreading information that is unique to a single record across two tables, I thought might add confusion.

This would be a great solution if there were a default list of instrumentation builds that the user would select from… but because they are all unique I don’t think it works.

[nickboom]

What I am asking for might be the ability to insert a table into a cell.

A long-text or rich-text field with a predefined default “template” might also be a nice solution

[Jonathan_Letts1]

If you did it with linked tables you could also do a roll up to figure out the actual usage of each of the tools. Food for thought.