How to filter the answers for dropdowns or flexible dropdowns?

About this article

This article will explain how to narrow down the list of possible answers based on other dropdown or flexible dropdown questions from the response form or based on user profile fields.

How does filtering work?
How to filter a dropdown or a flexible dropdown?
Filter examples

Prerequisites

Library and at least one Dynamics modules enabled
Templafy Desktop and Office VSTO add-in installed
Tenant admin/owner access or Space owner access
The dropdown question must be eligible for filtering (either another dropdown or a user profile dropdown field can be used to filter the dropdown)

How does filtering work?

Sometimes, when building the response form, the Dropdown or Flexible dropdown questions might require to filter one another to narrow down the possible answers for the end-users. In order to filter Dropdown or Flexible dropdown questions, all the possible answers must be linked to the same data source and be set up as reference schema fields. A Dropdown or Flexible dropdown questions can be filtered by more than one field if they related to one another.

How to filter a dropdown or a flexible dropdown?

Filtering Dropdown or Flexible dropdown questions in the response form can be done following these steps:

In the Template Designer, navigate to the Form tab
Click Add question
Select Dropdown or Flexible dropdown in the Type dropdown
Click on Filter options
This will be displayed if the question is eligible for filtering
Click Add filter
Select the question that should be used as a filter
Repeat steps 5 and 6 to add additional filters if necessary
Click Save or Add to form

If there is only one answer left in the final filtered Dropdown, it is possible to hide the questions from the response form as no additional interaction will be required by the end-user.

Only applicable to Dropdown and Flexible dropdown (data connector questions cannot be filtered).
The filter option will only appear if the question created can be filtered either by a user profile field or by another question from the response form.
When both the parent questions are Flexible dropdowns, the child question will not display any answer.
When both the parent questions are Dropdowns, the child question will display the filtered answer and the child answer will update if the parent answer changes.
When the parent question is a Dropdown and the child question is a Flexible dropdown, the child question will display the filtered answer but the child answer will not update if the parent answer changes.
When the parent question is a Flexible dropdown and the child question is a Dropdown, the child question will be grayed out as this use case is currently not supported.

Filter examples

Filter the departments displayed in the response form based on the office of the user

Create a dropdown question using "Department:" as the Question title, linking to the Departments data source, and being filtered by the Office from the user profile.

It should be noted that the data source used in the user profile and in the response form should contain references.

Filter the available descriptions based on the use case AND the module chosen in the response form

Create three Dropdown questions,

The first Dropdown question using "Use case:" as the Question title and linking to the ProductUsecases data source
The second Dropdown question using "Module:" as the Question title, linking to the ProductModules data source
The third Dropdown question using "Description:" as the Question title linking to the Products data source, and is being filtered by the Use case Dropdown AND the Module Dropdown

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