cognito-forms
I'm creating a form for student registration and I have a field called Student's Primary Address. Under a new form section, Parent #1, I want to have an address with an option to fill in the content from the Student's Primary Address field. It must have the text, as I'm exporting this to another database and can't just have a yes/no field. Ultimately I want the ability to "copy" previously entered information into other aspects of the form.
Is this possible?
I am a developer for Cognito Forms.
Assume you have a Currency field called Utilities and a Choice field called Timeframe, with the options Monthly and Yearly. Your calculations would then be:
Monthly Amount
=Utilities / (Timeframe = "Monthly" ? 1 : 12)
Yearly Amount
=Utilities * (Timeframe = "Yearly" ? 1 : 12)
And of course you can just keep adding on additional items to the calculation for each type of cost.
Cognito Forms allows you to post a JSON document to webhooks when new entries are submitted that accurately reflects the data being collected. Forms can be hierarchical with multiple repeating sections and even nested repeating sections, so it naturally lends itself to being expressed using JSON. Repeating sections are not stored in a single field--they are actually arrays of child entities that have their own fields and children.
For example, the form you described might look like this:
And the corresponding JSON looks like this:
As you can see, the Children repeating section is represented correctly in JSON as an array of child entities, each of which have Name and Gender fields.
Best Answer
You have a couple of options for this:
For many types fields you can set a default value for the fields. This could just be a constant value, but you can also enter a calculation that defaults the field on the fly based on changes to other fields. However, you cannot default address fields, so you would have to break this down into individual text fields to make this work. In the example below, the field named SecondField is defaulted to the value of FirstField.
Another option is to have a set of calculated fields that represents the parent's primary address. These fields could be calculated from a combination of the students's primary address, the Yes/No field selection, and anything entered for the parent's primary address. These calculated values will be included in the export. You could make the parent address conditionally show based on the Yes/No selection and make these calculated fields always be hidden so they only appear in the export.
So generally the answer to your question is yes, but names and addresses are a bit more complicated by their nature. Please mark this as the answer if it addresses your needs or add comments if you need clarification or if it will not be enough to fulfill your requirements.