Create An Order Form That Minimizes Manual Selection Of Products

Do you want to create an order form where there is no need to select products manually and capture only the quantities against the products? Want to enable a setting where the form will be populated with all the products automatically?

If you have a Sales company and your salespersons visit customers on a daily/weekly basis and deliver products, this tutorial helps you to simplify the order taking process. Generally, while filling an order form, the salespersons need to select a product from the list for every product and enter other details. Due to the manual selection of products every time, the process will take more time to fill the order form.

Here the Auto Create Instances property comes into action. It minimizes the manual selection of products every time and instances will be created automatically for all the items.

This tutorial helps you understand the functionality of the Auto Create Instances property that is applicable to the Repeatable Section data type. In this tutorial, we will create an order form that helps you to minimize the manual selection of products in a list.

Steps to Create an Order Form

This section walks you through the various steps involved in the creation of an Order Form and the configuration of the Auto Create Instances property to a repeatable section data type.

  1. As a first step, you need to create a product list with the design as shown in the below image. Check out the Create a List page to know how to create a list.
    Here, we have created a list with fields Product Name, Product ID, Unit of Measurement, and Unit Price.
  2. Now add items to the Products List. Check out the Add an Item to List page to know how to add items.
    As you can see, we have added some sample products to the list.
  3. After adding items, map list items to the employee who takes care of the sales activities. Check out the Map List Items to an Employee page to know how to map list items.
  4. Now create an order form as shown below. Check out the Create a Form page to know how to create a form.
  5. We have added a Repeatable Section data type as Product Details with fields as shown below.

  6. Configure the Products list to the Select Product field. Make the Product ID, Unit of Measurement, Price Per Unit fields as Computed and set the relevant list fields in the formula.
    As per this form design, the user needs to click on Add button to select products every time. If the user wants to sell more products, this will take more time to fill the form.

  7. To simplify this, we need to enable the Auto Create Instances property for the Repeatable Section data type. To enable this, click on the Product Details (Repeatable Section) field and click on the Auto Create Instances option.
  8. Click the checkbox as shown below. Select a list field from the dropdown and click OK.
    The instances will be created based on the configured list items.
  9. Save the form after completing the configuration part. With this, we have done the configuration part.

Steps to Check How it Works

Here, we will submit the form and check how the Auto Create Instances property works.

  1. Navigate to Web App > Forms. Click on the plus icon given on the Product Order Form card.
  2. Now you can see the Product Details section.
    The instances have been created automatically for all the items in the Products List. There is no need to click on Add button and select products. The salespersons just need to enter the quantity delivered against each product. This property reduces the selection of products every time.

This property creates instances for all the items in a list. For example, let's say you have a products list with items more than 100. If you choose only the Auto Create Instance property, the instance will be created for all the 100 items in the list. It is very difficult for the user to manage all the 100 instances.

Check out the Create An Order Form That Enables Category Based Product Selection tutorial to simplify this concern.