Rules are a powerful feature with Formstack for Salesforce that allows you to take greater control of the data you display and the data entered, all while providing a seamless experience for your end users. Below, we will review the features and functionalities of Rules so you can build powerful forms to help your business grow.
Get started
Navigate to the Edit Rules tab in your form builder.
From here, click the New Rule button to get started.
Create your first rules
If you are familiar with Logic or Salesforce Workflows or Flow, Rules operate in a similar way. We want to tell a Rule to look at certain criteria and from there, tell the Rule to perform a certain action.
If we start from the beginning, we choose the following:
-
If all of the following are true
This means all of the criteria we enter below in the Rule must be met for the Rule to fire. This uses AND logic.
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If any of the following is true
This means that at least one of the criteria we enter below must be met for the Rule to fire. This uses OR logic.
Choosing a Field
We want to add the actual criteria we want the Rule to look at before firing. Where it says --select an item-- we want to choose a Field on our form to set the criteria. If a field you want to use is not listed, you'll need to add it to your form.
Choose an operator
Depending on the field you selected, you'll want to add an Operator. For the majority of Fields, these are the following options you can choose from:
- is equal to
- not equal to
- contains
- does not contain
- starts with
- ends with
- does not start with
- does not end with
However, if you are using a Number field, you'll be given the following options instead:
- is equal to
- not equal to
- is less than
- is greater than
- is less than or equal to
- is greater than or equal to
After this, you want to choose the value of the criteria. You can either choose:
- An existing field on the form. Click "Select an Existing Field" for this option.
- A value. This is a typed, static value. Click "Set a Value" for this option.
Add additional criteria
If you want to add additional criteria, you can hover over the right of the rule and a blue Plus Sign will appear.
If you click on this plus side, you'll see another line appear where you can add criteria by selecting a field, operator and value/field.
Group criteria together
As you can see above, we're currently telling our rule to look at years of work experience and birthdate. But what if we also want to look at the Source field, regardless of birthdate and work experience? We can do so by clicking the + And/Or button above.
As you can see below, we are now telling our criteria to look at years of Work Experience and Birthdate OR the Source field in order for our rule to fire.
What if we want to add an additional Source? Since our Source field is a Picklist, only one option can be selected at a time. No fear, click the plus sign symbol to the right of where it says Email Marketing to add another line. Here, we will add another line that says Source equals "Advertisement on a Website."
We also want to make sure our criteria says "Or if Any of the following is true." This tells our logic to look at either Source. If wanted it to fire when both values are met, we would change this to "Of if All of the following is met."
Define the action
After we add our initial criteria that tell when the Rule should fire, we now need to add the action itself! When adding an action, you have the following actions you can perform:
- Show
- Hide
- Populate
- Display an Error Message
- Make Read Only
- Make Required
- Make Not Required
- Set Picklist Values
After we define the action, we can choose if want to apply the action to a Page, Section, or Field. Let's choose to Hide a field on our form.
Add a second rule
To add a second rule to your form, click the + New Rule underneath your existing Rule. A good rule of thumb when adding the second rule is to think: Do I need to add an action to an additional field?
🔺If you are editing the same field as any of the Rules above, you should add additional criteria to the existing rules and not create a new one. The rule engine currently requires unique THEN conditions for all rules. If two rules are attempting to modify the same field with the same property this may cause rules to not execute properly.
When a rule’s condition is not matched then the opposite of the defined rule action is executed by default.
This applies to
- hide/show actions
- make required/not required
- make read-only/not read-only
For example, if the THEN action is to show a field but the IF condition is not met, then the reverse action is automatically executed and the field is hidden (even though this is not explicitly defined).
This can cause confusion if multiple rules have the same field in the THEN action. The end result is likely to be based on the last rule containing the target field in its THEN action.
💡We recommend that all IF conditions to perform a specific THEN action are combined in a single rule.
💡When setting up complex rules, make sure that you have just one rule that contains one show action for one particular field or section. Create a rule for a particular then action...then set up all of the conditions that lead to that then action in one rule.
Note: If you are ready to dive into rule creation, but want to make sure you are creating them the best way possible? Please take a look through this companion article that covers the "Best Practices" for rule creation.