General Discussion

Hello, I'm working on a form for visual inspections. I'd like to be able to provide a custom URL (to our site for managing nonconformities) that allows inspectors to reference open NCs that have already been found on the machine they are inspecting.

The string concatenation feature seemed perfect, as I could take the machine number and use it as a parameter in the URL:

However, there seems to be no option to set the data type as URL which makes it very difficult to actually open the URL. On the IOS app for instance, it can't even be manually copied and pasted into the browser.

I also can't push it to a free text field with URL datatype as I believe only dropdowns connected to a data source can push data.

Are there any plans to allow more datatypes for the concatenation question? Is there another solution I'm not thinking of? Thanks!

Edit: Also apologies if this should have been posted in Best Practices. I don't see any way to delete the post, sorry.

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Brett Senders
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Hi Brett, welcome to the Community!

I'm happy to tell you that you've started down the right path with getting your form set up as you're looking to, there's just a couple more steps you need to do.

You've already got the text field for the inspectors to add machine number, and you're using the String Concatenation question type to add that machine number to your URL

The next step is to create a Text Field question type with the Data Type set to URL.  I also suggest setting that question to Read Only, so that no one can accidentally change the URL.

Next you'll use Conditional Logic to take the value of the String Concatenation question and add it to this new URL text field.

You can see here that I've set it up so that if the text field used to gather the Machine ID (custom url string) has a value in it, then set the value of the URL text field (FinalURL) to the value of the string concatenation question (CustomURL)

Once you've set that up, I would suggest hiding the string concatenation question from both the form and the report, as you likely don't need that URL getting shown twice.

I hope those instructions help you get this form set up, but if you have any other questions or anything just let us know!

If you are new to Conditional Logic, check out our product documentation here: https://docs.truecontext.com/1374411/Content/LandingPages/ConditionalLogic.htm

We also have some great courses in our TrueContext University, starting with our Level 1 course that you can find here: https://university.truecontext.com/training/afb65924-eaf1-11ed-ae30-02d47b69d3fd/overview

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Pat Cooney
Community Engineer
TrueContext
community@truecontext.com
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Hi Pat,

Thank you for the quick reply! Yes, this solution works perfectly. 

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Brett Senders
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Original Message:
Sent: 07-04-2024 11:41
From: Pat Cooney
Subject: Format string concatenation as URL?

Hi Brett, welcome to the Community!

I'm happy to tell you that you've started down the right path with getting your form set up as you're looking to, there's just a couple more steps you need to do.

You've already got the text field for the inspectors to add machine number, and you're using the String Concatenation question type to add that machine number to your URL

The next step is to create a Text Field question type with the Data Type set to URL.  I also suggest setting that question to Read Only, so that no one can accidentally change the URL.

Next you'll use Conditional Logic to take the value of the String Concatenation question and add it to this new URL text field.

You can see here that I've set it up so that if the text field used to gather the Machine ID (custom url string) has a value in it, then set the value of the URL text field (FinalURL) to the value of the string concatenation question (CustomURL)

Once you've set that up, I would suggest hiding the string concatenation question from both the form and the report, as you likely don't need that URL getting shown twice.

I hope those instructions help you get this form set up, but if you have any other questions or anything just let us know!

If you are new to Conditional Logic, check out our product documentation here: https://docs.truecontext.com/1374411/Content/LandingPages/ConditionalLogic.htm

We also have some great courses in our TrueContext University, starting with our Level 1 course that you can find here: https://university.truecontext.com/training/afb65924-eaf1-11ed-ae30-02d47b69d3fd/overview

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Pat Cooney
Community Engineer
TrueContext
community@truecontext.com
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