How do Global Placeholder Tables work in Q&A?

Clause9 Q&A
1

Hello everyone,

I have been using normal global placeholders for some time now. However, I have not figured out how to get global placeholder tables working, even after looking at the documentation.

I have created a global placeholder table called attorney-list, and added the columns name and email:

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I have added some test data:

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What I am trying to figure out is how to get my data as a predefine in a Q&A Table Question. In the table options, I selected the Global Placeholder Table under Predefines>Placeholder

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This is how I have gotten non-table global placeholders to work in other Q&A Table-Questions. But in the example above, I get nothing. I am obviously missing something here:

  1. How does the Q&A know which global-placeholder-table-collumn to pull the data from?
  2. Is there a way to connect the entries of the two columns? If I select “Name A”, I want to automatically select “Email A” for the next row. How would I do this?

Thanks for any help!

Best
Kai

2

Hi Kai,

  1. I completely understand your confusion, but unlike what your intuition would tell you, table-placeholders are not intended to create placeholders in Q&A tables. Instead, the documentation explains that their function is:

    “Table placeholders are primarily useful to create default values for table-based answers. They are also used to store settings for certain integrations, such as electronic signatures.”

    So what you should be using here, is what you already seem to have tried: non-table global placeholders, in order to show a list of predefined options in relevant cells of the table.

  2. As for your second question re. connecting the entries of the two columns: as usual, this is a very fair question, but with a complicated answer, because you need to do a lookup of value X within a series of potential values at the moment a selection is made by the end-user, and then insert that found value Y in some other column. This can be done through custom functions attached to the table, but it’s really advanced.

    It can be done (we have implemented a few of those for customers), but this kind of custom code is error-prone and difficult to maintain. And you need to learn the embedded programming language.

    If we get more questions from our user base in this direction, we could actually consider to add a few standard lookup functions like this to cope with standard situations. Although after several years of Clause9, I really wonder whether there is a “standard” situation, because everyone has slightly different requests…

3

Dear Maarten,

thanks for the insights, I understand that it works very differently to what I had assumed.

Which table-based answers is this referring to? I have conceptually thought of repeating-list-datafields as a “table”, but I believe this is not what is meant here. I am still trying to understand in which situations this first example is useful. Maybe someone who has implemented this already could be so kind to post an example?

The second example with electronic signatures is explained more in-depth in the documentation, I think I have grasped that - but that use-case does not really apply to my organization.

Thanks as always

Best
Kai