Auto Numbered Parents, but not Children

Rofonic27

Yes, I know. This topic has been floating around for a while and there appears to be multiple options/solutions provided, but I do not think they apply. Asking the braintrust... First, I think it would be helpful to think of how a standard Sales Order or Purchase Order form would operate within an ERP with a Header and Line level areas.

I am creating a Sample Tracking sheet with two intake forms. The sheet has a column titled "Sample Request No." that is set to auto number (we create a lot of sample requests and they are currently being manually nuymbered, which is ridiculous). Sample request May containe multiple lines as there may be up to 7 products per request (it would be a line of products). To separate the "Header" from the Lines, I have created two forms. Intake Form One takes care of all the header data. Upon submit, it launched the second form for Item Level entry. Submit on that form relaunches the form so more items can be entered (to stop that loop, I have a hyper link that is labeled "Start a new Sample Request).

This is working fine with the exception of the auto numbering. I am not looking to have a new sample request number for each line. I am looking for the autogenerated number than occurs upon Submit of the Header Form to be the master number and the Line Level items to be under that number/header. Now, on the sheet, this is working in terms of hierarchy structure, but the children all have new Sample Request No.s

I thought about perhaps createing a new "helper column" called "Is Parent" and on Intake Form One, setting it to default of Yes (checked) and then hidding it. And on Intake Form Two, setting it to default No (blank) and then hidding it. This would force a difference between the rows to which perhaps a formula could be created to reference the Sample Request Number from the parent row to the children (though I do not think that will work on the auto numbered row).

The end goal is to export the Header Row and Item Rows to a document (like a PDF conversion - of which I will tackle after the above).

Ideas?

Paul Newcome

Using the idea of a default field to indicate parent vs child rows could work but only if the child rows are in fact being indented and there is only one person filling out these forms at a time.

Rofonic27

If only there was conditional formatting that would auto indent a row if a condition was or was not met.