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How To: Default Value for Picklist Field

Dean 1 Comment

You may find that a myEvolv form that you wish to use contains a picklist field that cannot be done away with, even though the user is always going to be selecting the same item.  For instance, you may have a treatment plan for a program where there is only one category of goals, but you have to select that category on each and every component anyway.  Just like other fields in myEvolv, you have the option of setting a default value for a picklist field, but it is a little trickier to setup than it is for text and date fields.  Defaulting values for picklist fields where there are no real options will save your users time when completing their work in myEvolv.

For my example, I have a service event for Attendance Documentation that requires a Service Location field. My user-defined look-up table for Location has 9 options to select, but for my Day Care program, only one location should ever be used for this service event: Day Care. My Day Care staff are sometimes erroneously selecting a different location and are complaining about having to do the extra clicking required to fill in a field that is always the same value.

The simplest way to handle this is to use the default value on my service location field in order to make sure the value we want to be there is always selected, but when I enter ‘Day Care’ in the default value for the picklist field, it doesn’t work. What gives?

Simplest Method: Hard-coded GUID

When you use Picklist fields on your form, the underlying data type is a Foreign Key ID, which means the data value actually being stored in the database is the GUID for the picklist item that you are selecting, NOT the description, shortcut code or any other column from the table being referenced. What we need to do here is provide the GUID for the picklist item that we want selected.

There are a few different ways to find the GUID for your intended picklist item. See Tips and Tricks: Two Methods for Finding a GUID for two methods.

Assuming you have the GUID, then all you need to do in the default value field of the service_location is enter the GUID surrounded by quotes.

Now the form defaults with “Day Care” selected for this field.

NOTE: When hard-coding with GUIDs, myEvolv Classic requires all upper-case letters in the GUID and myEvolv NX requires all lower-case letters in the GUID. If you are still using classic and intend to use the method below.

More Robust Method: getDataValue

This method is more robust because it works in both Classic and NX, though the over-use of getDataValue can cause system performance to slow.

Instead of hard-coding the GUID, we will use a getDataValue() call to lookup the correct GUID using the description of the item we wish to default.

For this method, you need to know some things about the lookup table you need to fetch the GUID from. In my example, I know that the LUT is a user-defined LUT, so the table is going to be user_defined_lut. I know that the primary key column for that table, the column I want the GUID from, is therefore user_defined_lut_id. And I also know that the column that contains the name of the item in that table is called description. With those bits of information, I can put together a getDataValue() call that will return the correct GUID and I can put that call into the Default Value attribute for my Service Location field.

getDataValue('user_defined_lut', 'description', 'Day Care', 'user_defined_lut_id');

The result is the same as above, with “Day Care” defaulting into the field on the form.

Other Possibilities

The possibilities are endless when it comes to default value logic, since the Default Value attribute accepts any JavaScript code that you might concoct. Whatever code you come up with, the end result must be a single GUID that is a primary key value from a record in the table being used as your picklist field’s LUT.

myEvolv Tips: Subform Field Manipulation

Dean 7 Comments

Credit for figuring these out/discovering them goes to Perry. I find myself referring to them in a training binder I got from last year’s NY Training Summit and figured it would be easier to just get them up on the web so I don’t have to go hunting for that binder every time. The following code works for Classic.

Subform Considerations

Subforms have to be handled differently than forms when it comes to JavaScript because while in the form designer, the two things look identical, the way that myEvolv renders a subform in the browser is very different from how it renders a form. But it isn’t radically different and the main changes account for the fact that a subform can have one or more rows and so you need to be more specific about which field you are trying to manipulate so that you don’t change every line simultaneously.

Scenario 1: Get the Value of a Subform Field

This code is for use within the subform, e.g. if you want to default the value of one field based on the value of another on the same subform.

self.getElementFromXML(currentRowXML, 'column_name');

Note the self object is being used here. This is the subform object as distinguished from the parent form object. The parameter currentRowXML then further narrows it down to the current record/row on the subform that you are concerned with.

Scenario 2: Set the Value of a Subform Field

Again, for use within a subform, this code can be used to set the value of a field in the same subform, e.g. when you want the On Change event to auto-populate a field.

this.form.'column_name'.value;

If you are checking a checkbox, use this code:

this.form.'column_name'.checked = true;

Note that in this code, you do keep the single quotes in the code for it to work properly. All you change is the column_name

Scenario 3: Get the Value of a Parent Form Field

With this code, you can get the value of a field in the parent form based on an action in the subform.

window.parent.getFormElement('column_name');

Note the window.parent is the only difference from the code you would use on the parent form. This is what allows your code to ‘jump up out of the subform’.

Scenario 4: Set the Value of a Parent Form Field

Maybe you figured it out by now but you can use the same small change to set values on the parent form from the subform.

window.parent.setFormElement('column_name', value);

Scenario 5: Trigger an Alert from the Subform

Alerts are useful in guiding user activity and you can trigger them from subforms. Similar to the last two, the trick is moving back up the DOM to the parent form to trigger it.

window.parent.window.alert('Alert Message');

Other Possibilities

It is possible to go the other way and get and set values on subform records from the parent form, however, it becomes a much more complex problem that requires very specific solutions for very specific challenges. That is because of the One-to-Many relationship that the subforms have with the parent form. For these types of situations, you will probably be targeting the subform itself and then looping through each record to get or set values.

How To: Launch Forms from Other Forms

Dean Leave a comment

I have found that it is often small things that can make all the difference in how user-friendly our myEvolv processes are. One problem that we ran into with myEvolv was that if you were in the middle of working with a form where you needed to select, say, a collateral but that collateral had not yet been added for the client, you would need to save the form as a draft (if allowed), navigate to the collaterals formset member to add one and then return to the original form to select the collateral. If you have experienced this, then you know how annoying it can be.

My solution to this issue was to add urls to our forms that would launch the collaterals wizard without the need to close the form at all. Users are then able to add collaterals on the fly. This could be used for other relationships like health providers or families and possibly even things outside of the relationships formset. This post will demonstrate how to create a URL form variable to launch the collaterals wizard but you should be able to apply the same steps to other formset members and achieve the same results.

Adjust Your Browser Settings

myEvolv creates popup windows just like any other website by opening a new browser window with it’s own URL. The default browser settings for Internet Explorer allow myEvolv to hide the URL of those popups but we want to examine the URL because we want create our own URL’s to display on our forms that will open the same windows. To make the URL visible on popups:

1) In Internet Explorer, go to Internet Options
2) Click on the “Security” tab
3) Make sure you are in the “Trusted Sites” zone and click “Custom level…”
4) In the “Miscellaneous” section of the “Security Settings”, DISABLE “Allow websites to open windows without address or status bars”
5) Click “OK” and then close Internet Explorer Settings

security-settings

With this setting disabled, you will now see the URL for all popups that myEvolv creates. See the image below for the before (top) and after (bottom).

url-vs-no-url

What’s in a myEvolv URL?

I am interested in getting the URL for the popup window that is created when I go to create a New Manual Event for a Personal Collateral so I pick any client and open the form to add a new personal collateral. The URL for that window is long so let’s break it down and see what we can determine about it. Below, I have the URL and have added a line break before each &

https://myagency.netsmartcloud.com/new_person_form.asp?process_code=COLLATERAL
&form_id=NEW_COLLAT_SEARCH
&parentValue=CA333940-AC8A-4DB0-962D-5E70C6DFB13B
&key_value=
&addAllowed=true
&editAllowed=true
&deleteAllowed=true
&isAmendment=false
&isCompleteScheduledEvent=false
&mode=ADD
&sessionID=309a0ab9-74a9-495f-bb67-9b0789939d57
&data=SERVER
&serviceTrack=EE353446-DEC8-4ECF-81AA-D97CA183B0D5
&event_id={2274E0EF-10D8-4341-A75B-490F7947B922}

We want to keep this URL the same as much as we can but there are some variables we need to identify in here so that we can generate a unique URL for each form instance based on whose client record we are working on. If I just dumped this URL onto a form statically, I would always be creating collaterals for the client whose record I had open when I grabbed this URL along with some other problems. The parts we need to examine more closely are anything with a GUID.

The pieces of this URL that we will need to generate dynamically on our form are

  • parentValue – this is the people_id of the client for whom we would be creating the collateral
  • sessionID – this is the id of your current session. If this is not updated for each login session, the popup window will take you to a myEvolv login screen
  • serviceTrack – this is a client-related id similar to the parentValue

event_id does not need to be changed. I am not sure what it is but the value stays the same no matter which client record so its safe to bet you can keep it static.

Form Design – Adding a URL Variable

On your form, insert a new variable wherever you want it to display on your form. You can name the variable whatever you would like and caption it however you would like. I typically make the field not modifiable so that users can’t make changes to the url that might have an adverse effect. You might also want to shorten the display length so that it looks better on the form.

url-properties

We then need to concentrate on generating the URL string that will be our default value for this variable. For those of you who have not done URL string building, it just involves a lot of string concatenation. We first create a variable and assign it a string value that is equal to the first chunk of static text. Then we concatenate our first variable. Then concatenate the next chunk of string that is static and so on until we have our full url.

The first section of the url that is completely static is https://myagency.netsmartcloud.com/new_person_form.asp?process_code=COLLATERAL&form_id=NEW_COLLAT_SEARCH&parentValue= so the first line of our code will be

var myUrl = 'https://myagency.netsmartcloud.com/new_person_form.asp?process_code=COLLATERAL&form_id=NEW_COLLAT_SEARCH&parentValue=';

Then we need to append our variable for parentValue, which is the people_id of the client whose record we are in. That comes to the current form already loaded in a variable called parentValue so we can just plug that in here

myUrl += parentValue;

Then we can append the next chunk of static url

myUrl += '&key_value=&addAllowed=true&editAllowed=true&deleteAllowed=true&isAmendment=false&isCompleteScheduledEvent=false&mode=ADD&sessionID=';

And now we have to append our sessionID, which is also already loaded into a variable by the same name

myUrl += sessionID;

Then the next static chunk

myUrl += '&data=SERVER&serviceTrack=';

And the serviceTrack variable (again, handily available in a variable already)

myUrl += serviceTrack;

And then the last bit of the url

myUrl += '&event_id={2274E0EF-10D8-4341-A75B-490F7947B922}';

Now that we have our url loaded into a variable, we just need to output it so our final line is simply

myUrl;

url-field-on-form

Full Code Block

***Remember to change myagency at the beginning of the url to match your agency’s url if you are copying and pasting this code.***

var myUrl = 'https://myagency.netsmartcloud.com/new_person_form.asp?process_code=COLLATERAL&form_id=NEW_COLLAT_SEARCH&parentValue=';
myUrl += parentValue;
myUrl += '&key_value=&addAllowed=true&editAllowed=true&deleteAllowed=true&isAmendment=false&isCompleteScheduledEvent=false&mode=ADD&sessionID=';
myUrl += sessionID;
myUrl += '&data=SERVER&serviceTrack=';
myUrl += serviceTrack;
myUrl += '&event_id={2274E0EF-10D8-4341-A75B-490F7947B922}';
myUrl;

Troubleshooting Tip

You can see the results of your concatenation in the URL variable on the form so if you keep it modifiable and give yourself a generous display size, you can check to see where you might have left pieces out by mistake.

launching-form-url

Quirky Behavior

If you built your URL string correctly, you should launch the Add Collateral window from your form. One thing I have noticed is that after you fill out the form and hit save, the form does not close or give any indication that the collateral had been added successfully. One challenge in getting the form to behave any different is that these forms are system not-modifiable so we don’t have the ability to go in and add a window.closeAfterSave = true snippet to them. Users must be trained to close the window manually after they have saved the form without triggering an error for things like blank required fields.

How To: Use a Default Value on a Progress Note

Dean 8 Comments

EDIT 8/3/2018: Reader Rosemary asked about using text templates in conjunction with this code rather than including the raw HTML in the JavaScript code. Indeed there is a way to do that, so I have included that method at the bottom of the post. Reviewing the post also exposed that my code had a syntax error so I fixed that. Thank you, Rosemary!

Progress notes in Evolv are system fields in myEvolv that have special properties that make them particularly useful in certain situations. For example, the Progress note field is included in many of the views available to subreports so being able to use the progress note column on a form allows the data contained therein to be fed back on other forms via subreport.

Unlike other form fields, however, you do not add a progress_note field to your form in the form designer. Instead, you add the progress note in the Event Setup area by checking the “Has Single Note” checkbox.

has-single-note-checkbox

Just like with the Service Related Encounter Information that I addressed in another post, checking this checkbox will append fields to your form at the time that the event is launched. Unlike the Service Related Encounter Information, however, there is no way to add the progress note field to your form in the form designer so that you can manipulate its attributes. It is therefore tricky to set a default value for the progress note, but not impossible. The following guide will show how you can use jQuery and the form header attributes to simulate the use of the default value attribute on a progress note field. This can be useful for defaulting in a template when you know only one template would be used and you want decrease the risk that the clinician forgets to apply the template.

How Memo Fields Render

One of the things that makes manipulating a Memo field more difficult in myEvolv is that they are a much more complex field being rendered on the form. With a custom_string type of field, for example, there is just a label/caption and an html input field so you can use some pretty basic javascript to get and set the value of the field or use some of the formfunctions.js functions to get or set the form elements.

Memo fields, on the other hand, have their own menus for manipulating the formatting of the text and spellcheckers, etc. When you are dealing with a Memo field, you are actually dealing with an iframe element that contains a series of div elements that hold those buttons and then finally, buried deep in the iframe you will find a div with the id of “Composition”. That is where the text value of the memo resides.

Further complicating things is the fact that unlike other types of fields that you can easily target by column name, Memo fields must be targeted by their id, which is the GUID that represents their form_lines_id.

Accessing the Text Value of a Memo Field

To target the divelement that contains the text value of your memo field, you must turn to jQuery and use the following code:

var memo_text = $(form_lines_id).contents().find('#Composition').html();

Since the Progress Note field is a system column that has existed for a long time, it has the same form_lines_id in everyone’s system, so to get the memo text of a Progress Note memo field, plug in the form_lines_id:

var memo_text = $('#BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5').contents().find('#Composition').html()

Explanation of Code

var memo_text =
This creates a variable called “memo_text” that will hold the value of the memo field we target.

$('#BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5')
This targets the element on the form that has and id of ‘BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5’, which is the progress note’s iframe. If you want to target a different memo field, you will need to determine the form_lines_id of that field and plug it in here.

.contents()
This gets all of the contents of the iframe targeted above.

.find('#Composition')
This searches the contents above for an element with an id of “Composition”. This is the element that contains the Memo field’s text.

.html()
This gets the html value contained inside the “Composition” div targeted above. We use the html() method because this will preserve the rich text formatting that has been applied to the text in the box.

Setting the Value of the Progress Note

You can set the value of the progress note field with very little changes to the above code. if I want to set the text inside the progress note to “Hello”, I use this code:

$('#BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5').contents().find('#Composition').html('Hello');

Since we are using the html() method, you can insert HTML markup with your text, which is what will allow you to insert a nice template. Remember that you have to escape your >’s and <‘s

Replicating the Default Behavior

Using the code above, we are able to manipulate the text inside the Memo field with On Change and On Click events on the loaded form just fine, but what can we do if we want to default a specific value into the progress note field when the form loads?

We can use the code above to set the value but we need that code to fire AFTER the form has been loaded. Fortunately, there is an attribute on the form called After Load Code that we can use as the trigger for this code.

after-load-form-attribute

But, it’s not as simple as just dropping the code in there because while the code in this field will fire after the form loads, it does not necessarily fire after the memo field iframes are loaded. it is therefore necessary to wrap the code in a javascript setTimeout() function.

setTimeout(function(){$('#BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5').contents().find('#Composition').html('Hello');}, 5000);

The setTimeout() function takes two arguments. The first is the code that you want to execute. In the example above, I wrapped the code into an anonymous function. The second is the number of milliseconds it should wait before executing the code. In my example, I set the timer for 5000 milliseconds or 5 seconds. You can tweak this number as desired to achieve what you want it to do. With this code in place in the After Load Code attribute of the form, 5 seconds after the form loads, ‘Hello’ fills in on the progress note field.

Using A Text Template

You can use a text template in myEvolv to make this all a little easier, especially when it comes to formatting your progress note text. Create your default text in the text templates area of myEvolv.

Then within the setTimeout function, before the line of code that sets the progress note html, add the following line of code:

var myTextTemplate = getDataValue('text_template', 'description', '<text template description>', 'template_text');
where <text template description> is the description you have given your text template (beware of special characters). This line of code will grab your text template, then you can just use the variable you just created in the html() method.

Here’s what the final code would look like if you wanted to use your Incident Narrative text template.

setTimeout(function(){
var myTextTemplate = getDataValue('text_template', 'description', 'Incident Narrative', 'template_text');
$('#BFE6BE66-7983-4C3B-8374-1606E7D909A5').contents().find('#Composition').html(myTextTemplate);
}, 5000);

How To: Add Additional Links to Formsets on a Form

Dean Leave a comment

When you setup a service form in myEvolv, the Link to Person is usually setup in such a way as to make the name display as a link on the form. Users can then click the link and it will take them to a formset where they can look up additional information about the client or complete additional tasks related to the client.

link-to-person

There may be times when you want to add more than one link to a formset on a single form.

If you look at the Link to Person field in the form designer, you will see most of the setup that is required to create these links.

link-to-person-properties

Here, the people_id column is used to get the GUID for the client. Instead of just displaying that GUID, the All People Table is associated with the field. That renders the client’s name instead of the GUID. Then the Client Information Screen is used as the Formset to call. That renders the name as a link that opens the Client Information Screen when clicked.

Setting up another link might seem to be as easy as copying this setup on another field, but you quickly run into a couple hurdles that must be cleared.

Duplicate Fields

You cannot have the people_id column on your form twice so you need another way to add a link to the individual. Fortunately, myEvolv has a way to work around this using variables.

Variables are useful in this situation because we do not need the data stored in it to be saved to the database. We just want to hold some data while the form is rendered in the browser that will allow us to create the link and use it. We could go about this by creating a user-defined field that would be of foreign-key type and store a duplicate people_id GUID, but that would be overkill just to generate the link and clutter the database with redundant information.

When you create your variable, you can set it up similar to how you would set up a user-defined field.

In this case, you want the Data Type to be Foreign Key ID. You can use the All People Table as your Look-Up Table Used. Finally, you can choose the different Formset that you wish to call from this link to the person.

second-link-to-person-variable-properties-1

Default Value

If you saved your form at this point and tried it out, you would notice that your new variable field is empty and if you left it modifiable, you would need to select your client to get the link. That’s because we need to give the variable a default value.

The people_id field has some automatic default value functionality based on the fact that you are entering the event from a client’s record. myEvolv is setup to default some fields automatically based on the service track information – things like client, program and facility will fill in automatically when entering services from the Service Entry area because based on which program band and the client’s facility placement information, myEvolv is able to determine what the default value should be.

Our variable, on the other hand, has no such built-in functionality and so we must explicitly provide it with a default value to pre-populate.

To provide a default value in this case, simply put parentValue in the Default Value property of the variable. parentValue is equal to the selected client’s GUID and it is the value that people_id uses behind the scenes to pre-populate itself.

Now when you open your form from service entry, it should look something like this:

second-link-to-person

Each link to person opens a different formset.

*ARCHIVE* How To: Default Value in Picklist Field

Dean 1 Comment

NOTE: An updated version of this post for myEvolv NX is available here: How To: Default Value for Picklist Field

You may find that a myEvolv form that you wish to use contains a picklist field that cannot be done away with even though the user is always going to be selecting the same item.  For instance, you may have a treatment plan for a program where there is only one category of goals but you have to select that category manually anyways.  Just like other fields in myEvolv, you have the option of setting a default value for a picklist field but it is a little trickier to setup than it is for text and date fields.  Defaulting values for picklist fields where there are no real choices to be made will save your clinicians time when doing their work in myEvolv.

Some picklist fields have both a button that opens the picklist dialog and a place to type a code, which allows for faster entry for users who know the codes.

category-empty

You might think that you can designate a default value in the form designer in the same way that you designate a default value in a text field since there is a sort of text field available.  If you try that, however, you will find that this does not work.  The difference is that this field is actually used to store a foreign key value and so the default value must be a foreign key (the GUID) and not the description or code values for the item that you wish to default in.  Remember to place it within single quotes as you would a default text value.

default-value-filled

In my example, I needed the GUID for a custom treatment category named “Day Treatment”.  Looking at the field properties for this picklist field, I see that the Lookup table that is being used is ‘Problem Category Lookup – Not Safety Plan’, which tells me that I need to take a look at the ‘problem category’ table.

picklist-field-properties

I pulled that table into Crystal Reports and made a quick and dirty report that shows the problem_category_id and the description and grabbed the GUID that corresponds with my Day Treatment category.

guid-crystal-reports

With the GUID used as the default value on the picklist field, now ‘Day Treatment’ is the default value on the treatment plan whenever a new Category component is added to the treatment plan.

category-filled

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