An advanced way of formatting a field in your dashboard is to auto populate the content of a dropdown field with values obtained from a (filtered) sheet on your dashboard. If for instance your dashboard uses global filters or you want your users to be able to pick a relevant country/state based on the filtered view in your dashboard, this is an efficient way to show only relevant content in your WriteBackExtreme dropdown field.
The example below shows how you can auto populate a dropdown field to show the States where we actually sold products of a selected Product Sub Category in the dropdown of an annotation form.
For the demo we used the Gallery demo workbook with the “Collaboration Dashboard. This technique of dynamically populating dropdown fields will also work for the other modules and templates. Make sure you have an available Drop Down field in your schema (click here to learn more on creating schemas in the Management Console)
With the Management Console we first created a schema in which we added a “Dropdown Selection” field called “State” which has three default values (California, Texas and Nevada just for demonstration purposes). So by default users are only able to select one of these three states. In the Extensions configuration screen we then use the Field Formatting options to autopopulate the “State” field based on the map with states available in the dashboard. This will overrule the default content of the dropdown and allow you to show the States that are available in the map on the dashboard (either filtered or unfiltered).
To create an auto populating field in your form please make sure you have a Drop Down Select field in your schema. If you do not know how to manage schemas in the Management Console, check this section.
Go to the configuration screen of your extension by clicking the Pinwheel and select “CONFIGURE EXTENSION”
In the modal (pop up) select the “Worksheet-schema” option in the colored horizontal menu bar
Select the second tab called “Field formatting”
Now select the Drop Down Select field you want to automatically populate. In the example we used the field “State”
In the Field formatting screen now check the box next to “Enable dynamic population from Tableau”
Select a worksheet containing the column you want to use as values for the dropdown. In the example we select the worksheet “States”
Select the column from the selected worksheet in the above step. In the example we selected the column “State”
Make sure you press the “Save” button in the top right corner of the colored menu bar to save your changes.
The Drop Down Select field will now be automatically populated with the column “State” from the “States” worksheet
