Dropdown/radio internal values?

[ryan16]

I need to let my user pick from dropdown values of ALL, Female Only or Male Only

But in my database I have a field gender which is Male or Female.

Is there a way to have the drop down values not be exactly what is displayed, but an internal value? I remember in html there’s ability to have drop down’s display value and internal value be different.

Otherwise, doing my database query, I have to change my drop down to be ‘Female’ or ‘Male’ which makes less sense.

[ryan16]

So I was able to match my database field by changing it to what you see here

But the query only works for ‘all’ when you select the blank entry. I thought it might work as it matched none, and would be null based on this repeatinggroup query

(it does not)

Leaving a blank there to count instead of ‘all’ is just really crappy user experience.

Am I missing some advanced feature of drop downs that will make this more intuitive for the user?

Huh. If you set Placeholder to All, it actually sorta works. Its still clunky.

Hope this is useful for someone, leaving it here for the next noob.

It’s weird if you ask me. But workable.

[SerPounce]

This is how I handle:

1. Create a new custom state called something like “genderSearch”.
2. Create a workflow when dropdown changes to set value of “genderSearch” to this dropdown’s value only if this dropdown’s value isn’t All.
3. Create another workflow that when dropdown value changes to set value of “genderSearch” to Null only if this dropdown’s value is All.
4. Require an entry in the dropdown (this will prevent user selecting the blank).
5. Change the 3rd constraint in your RG to be authorGender = genderSearch.
6. Make sure the “Ignore empty constraints” in your RG search is checked.