Auto populate repeating section of forms

Hi Sunita,

Yes this is absolutely possible using the repeating section default values settings as described in this help page: https://help.nintex.com/en-US/nwc/Content/Designer/FormControls/Repeatingsection.htm. However there is a subtle nuance with Salesforce so read on here.

The linked help page describes that you can connect to dynamic repeating data which is usually supplied in a collection.  The number of repeating rows dynamically changes depending on how many items there are in the collection without you having to code anything.

One assumption that the help page doesn’t describe is the repeating items must be at the root of the object and in Salesforce’s case, it’s not at the root so we’re going to use the instructions on that page for using a text collection.

I know you’ve already created on data variable to retrieve all the Types and I assume you’ve populated a choice single control with these types.  Create a second data variable to retrieve the items associated with the type and create a condition to filter based on the Type. i.e. only retrieve the items where type = the type you selected in your choice single control.

Create a text form variable, lets call it “Items as text” and convert your collection to text using the convertToString formula:

Now go to your repeating section and set the following fields:

Default value type: Text

Default value: The Items as text variable

Make sure the names of the fields you have in your repeating section correspond to the API attribute names of the Item object.  You can find out the API attribute name by going to your object explorer.  Here’s an extract from my one which also includes custom attributes.

As an example, if I wanted to use Order Number in my repeating section, I’d name the field OrderNumber__c

Hope that helps!

PS credit given to my learned colleague, Talha, who provided valuable guidance in responding to this question.

Hi ​@Chris_Ben ,

Thank you for the detailed response. 

Please could you advise on the second question which is autopopulating the repeating sections with the Item information. At the moment the rows are displayed but not the information even though the data variable has been mapped to the controls in the repeating section. I am also getting more than the repeating sections needed. So I am trying to figure out why. Thanks

Hi Sunita, you don’t have to map the data variable to the controls as such but just make sure you have set the name of each one to the api name as per the last image in my post above.  If you’re getting more repeating rows than needed then double check the condition you set in the items lookup is correct.  You could debug this by displaying the variable “items as text” in a label.

Hi Sunita, I’ve provided more detailed instructions in this blog: 

Also if you aren’t displaying information through the data variable, just make sure that you selected the fields object when you created the form variable.  There are a few collections and objects to navigate through but the one to select is external data\items\records\records\fields

Hi ​@Chris_Ben ,

Thank you so much for this and the link you shared above. My repeating section now works perfectly😊.

Also, my items have varied number of elements all of which I also want to pull unto the nintex form from salesforce( more like a father-sons-grandsons of each son relationship). This seems like dynamic repeating sections within another dynamic repeat section. Any idea how best to approach this? Thank you.

Hi, ​@Chris_Ben - I am trying to do something like this on a task form, using external data, and I’m stuck.

The external data is coming from Azure Active Directory. It is finding members of our board of directors, of whom there are seven. I've set my repeating data section so that its number of rows defaults to the number of results found in AAD (which is indeed seven). In each row I have a Text-Short field called “Name" that I want populated with a director’s name. I have the repeating section set up like this:

As far as I can tell, the name of the field (“Name”) matches the attribute name in AAD. But the field is not populating the director’s name. I’m wondering if the Name attribute in AAD is actually called something else, but I don’t know how to find out. Above, you mention using something called “object explorer” or object manager to get the API attribute names. I have never heard of this and don’t know where to find it. I see nothing in the Nintex help documentation about it. (It’s also possible I don't have access to it.)

I also thought maybe I’m having that “nesting” problem, but I tried using a form variable as described above:

And:

But this isn’t working either. So, again, I’m wondering if the name of my “Name” field is incorrect. Any help with this would be much appreciated.

Hi Sunita,

We might be reaching the limits of what we can do with a single repeating section here because we don’t have a “click on a specific row” event which means you can go from the father to son (as we’ve done above) but you can’t click on a row in the “sons” repeating section to then display the grandsons.

What you could do is create another choice/drop down list that loads the sons when the father is chosen and then you replicate what we’ve done above except for the sons/grandsons relationship.  Something like this:

Alternatively if you are licensed for Nintex Apps then you could very easily create the 3-level nested structure.  There are two flavours of apps - 1. the standalone version that works seamlessly with NIntex Workflow and it has a direct connection to Salesforce and 2. a version that is native to Salesforce.

Hi David,

The object explorer is a Salesforce specific tool.  So you’d want to run a search over whatever system you are trying to access.  Usually the serach term api name or attribute name should do the trick.  For Azure AD here’s the list of attribute names: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-b2c/user-profile-attributes.

It think displayName might be the one you're after.

The other trick you can do is to convert the collection to text using that convertToString function and put the result of that in a label - that way you’ll see all of the attribute names returned by your lookup.

Also looking at your screenshots, I don’t think you need to convertToString to display the detail in the repeating section because in the case of the AAD query, the collection is at the root level so just insert this variable as your repeating section default (assumption: your query is using the Get Members of an Azure Active Directory Group operation.

Hi ​@Chris_Ben 

Thank you for the recommendations. 

A question on the link you shared above about dynamically rendering repeating sections, can the table variable pull data from an external source? Thank you. 

Thank you, ​@Chris_Ben! That displayName title was exactly what I needed. It’s working perfectly now.

And thanks for the heads-up on that Object Manager tool. No wonder I couldn’t find it!

Hi Sunita,

Tables are Nintex internal tables vs an external data source.  So all data is stored internally and isn’t linked to anything external.  If you wanted to though, you could have a workflow query an external data source and write the data to a Nintex table.