Thanks AaronPulver for the reply. I'm looking forward in the new year to see the contingent values been supported in feature service. Saying that, the demand of cascading dropdown has been there for long time from many since the ear of Collector or earlier. Though the indention to have form inputs restricted by data schema is good for data integrity, the way how it works in Collector / AFM actually put a lot limitations when design form in this app.
In the field, we use mobile form is not just a place to enter in the data, but also to guide users through questions and options by providing them the required info. For example, in a hydrant inspection and test form (a frequently used example by ESRI), user wants to know what the valid flow volume and pressure should be for a specific type of hydrant by pick the hydrant type in a dropdown list. Sound reasonable and simple workflow, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do this in Collector or AFM. I thought about using related table to do that, but that doesn’t work because the form won’t be able to read the related table before it’s saved. I also tried putting the description to the coded domain text, but it doesn’t work if the description text is more than couple of words, and it put everything in one line. Another example, how can I set the form to calculate Input3 by adding the result form Input1 and Input2. At the moment you can only add to Collector / AFM form if it’s in the table schema, the table schema directly dictates the form UI, which I think could be improved by allowing add any form elements regardless the table schema, and have a form engine to pipe the inputs to the valid output that goes into the database. It also saving us from saving the intermedia data that used to generate the final output and we don’t need to run post-process in the database to calculate the intermedia data to the final data we needed.
Seems there’re still plenty for AFM to catch up in terms of form design capabilities. There’re plenty of good mobile form apps out there hope it can provide some good examples.
