Can a field participate in multiple groups in a Field Maps smart form?

Question

I have a related table for tracking different water service connection activities. I've created all of the possible fields in the table that might be populated for at least one of these activities. Many of these activities have one or more fields in common across all of the activities.

I want to create groups of fields containing the relevant fields for each activity and ultimately use conditional visibility to display that group based on the work activity selected. However, I cannot seem to find a way to "duplicate" a field in the table into multiple groups.

To use a generic example, I have a field called 'Notes' to capture any miscellaneous info the user might need to add. This field needs to be a part of the field list for every work activity (so, every group created). Is there a way to include the 'Notes' field in every group (or in the case of other fields, some but not all groups)?

I would hate to resort to creating individual fields (NotesForActivity1, NotesForActivity2, etc.). How have others handled this situation? I'm sure I am not the first with this requirement.

Anonymous User · Accepted Answer

This is an interesting question and requirement. Field Maps and forms in general do not support referencing a field multiple times in the form. It may be worth adding an Idea to gauge any other interest in this.

To solve your problem today, I think you may need to consider not using conditional visibility with groups and instead apply the conditional visibility expressions to the field elements individually. You can re-use/reference expressions so it shouldn't be many more expressions to write.

For fields like notes, the expression may be a little more complex so that the field appears when any one of a set of values is matched (e.g. Includes(['activity1', 'activity2', 'activity3'], $feature["activity_type"]). So in this case the notes field would be visible if the activity_type was activity1, activity2, or activity3 but not any other value.