Using forms to Establish a Parent/Child Row Relationship

Omair Haque

Hi,

I'm trying to build out a sales pricing sheet that can be used by our sales team to enter a customers information and then the products that they'd like to purchase (with various different options). I'd want the interface for the sales person to be a form rather than a grid view to keep it simple and let various formulas and lookups drive different values.

What i have set up is the initial grid that has all possible questions, lookups, and formulas listed. I've also set up 2 forms but i need them to have a bit of interaction with one another. The first Form would be the customer information form. This is where the customer's name, address, contact info is entered. The next form would be for each product the customer is ordering. The form would re-open after every submission allowing the sales rep to add several products quickly, each iteration of the form would be a single product (of variable quantities).

What i want is to both forms to work together to set up a parent and children row relationships. The Customer form to set the parent record, and each iteration of the product form to be a child under that customer. This also needs to be a bit dynamic as we'd have a dozen or so sales reps (ideally) doing the same for different customers. I know smartsheet has a parent/child relationship function - but as far as i know this only works off the grid view and there isn't a way to automate this.

I'm just looking for suggestions to see if anyone has built out something like this in smartsheets before and if they can offer any suggestions on how to tackle this.

Andrée Starå

Hi Omair,

Unfortunately, (as you've noticed) it's not possible at the moment to automate what's a parent/child, but it's an excellent idea!

Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment to have your vote added

As a possible workaround (i used this recently for a client that had a similar need), you could have conditional formatting format the row of the parent to make it easy to see the different orders.

Would that work?

I hope that helps!

Have a fantastic weekend & Happy New Year!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Carlos GQA

Hi!

Two years have passed since this conversation. I was wondering if this feature actually made it to the pipeline of changes and is now available for use? I do think it is a great idea!

Andrée Starå

Hi @Carlos GQA

I hope you're well and safe!

Unfortunately, no, but it's still an excellent idea!

To add your vote! Please submit an Enhancement Request when you have a moment.

This might help.

• I developed a solution using two forms (or the same form by using conditional logic) that can be used to submit the main information and then the other information on a new row for each submission after the first.

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Kim Ryan

Sadly, the work arounds do not allow for the automation of a parent row to children rows.

Timrapuano

Hi, is there any update to this request from 3 years ago? I would also like to employ a form to add information as a child to a parent record.

Thank you,

Tim

oliviafrench

Also very interested in this feature!

ForeverLearning

Submitted an Enhancement Request as it's been four years now. It's odd that it's not already a feature!

Simply being able to designate a form entry as the parent row on a sheet and then choosing within the form how many child rows you want underneath seems like an obvious add on since manually adding/indenting rows is quite tedious and inefficient when working with data at scale - not smart.