Branching is here! 🎉

The form builders—for both the Main Form and role forms—now allow you to display a question to users based on the answer to a previous question. Sometimes called a “conditional question”, this permits you to set up your forms to collect information only if it is pertinent.

One example of how this can be useful is if you have more than one submission type, with authors choosing between, say, “presentation” and “panel”. If you want to collect different information for each type you previously either had to set up two calls—each with its own submission form—or you could use one call but had to make most questions optional and preface them with “If a presentation…” or “If a panel…”. Neither way was ideal.

Another example is if you have an “other” option for a question. Previously, you had to include a subsequent question along the lines of “If other, please specify” and make that question optional. That was kind of messy though, because someone could select “other” and leave the subsequent question blank. Or they could select something other than “other” and enter something in the subsequent question. Either way, you would need to ask for clarification.

Now, with the new branching feature, the form can display the subsequent question only if the “Other” option is selected. And most importantly, you can make the subsequent question required!

A few things to note about the branching feature:

• A question that is displayed only when a condition is met (the “child” question) must come after the question used to determine whether to display it (the “parent” question). Using the questions above as an example, “Please specify” (the child) must come after “How did you hear about us” (the parent).
• Only Radio Buttons and Dropdowns may be used as parent questions. Child questions may be of any question type.
• Each child question may only have one branching condition associated with it. (At least for now… stay tuned.)

I’d love to hear what you think about the new feature. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to let me know!