You can create relational forms by looking up the submitted data of a form and enabling your audience to select from those. Let’s see how to look up the submitted data of another form.

It’s especially helpful when you want to build multiple forms while sharing only one form with your audience. So your audience can choose from the pre-defined options or create new options inside the form.

Let’s say your HR department has an onboarding form (check out this template) to bring the new employees on board and keep a record of all employees in the company. Now let’s imagine you want to collect employee performance evaluation.

In your evaluation, instead of prompting everyone to type down their names, you can look up the names from the HR database (the onboarding form I just mentioned) and let people search and find their names. Let’s see how!

Don’t want to read the full article? The following video shows the full steps.

1. Create your form and fill it with some data

Create the form you want its submitted data to be used somewhere else. In the above example, it’s the employee onboarding form or the HR database. Then submit some data into the form so you’d be able to test out the lookup.

2. Create the form with lookup field

Now it’s time to create your second form, which is the one that has the lookup field. In the above example, it’s the employee evaluation form in which you want to look up the employees’ names from another form.

3. Add the lookup field

Edit your second form and from the list of fields, drop the Lookup into the right place in the canvas. In the properties of the field, select the form and the field inside it from which the data should be looked up.

You can also enable your audience add new options into the lookup by just leaving the “Enable users to add new records to this field” option on. Otherwise, you can turn it off.

Conclusion

There are multiple ways to connect forms and databases. In this tutorial, you saw how you can do so by looking up the submitted data of another form. You can also send data from one form to another. Also, check out this article to see different ways to pre-populate form questions with some data.

As always, you’re more than welcome to get in touch with us and let us know if you had any questions on this.