It’s funny how one good idea often begets another. We sat back thinking ‘that’s repeating sections done; tough but so worth it’, then we thought about those repeating sections; what if they contain information required to trigger a discrete follow-on task?

AppCan uniquely allows you to move mobile records between mobile users, but sending whole records stuffed full of populated repeated sections isn’t helpful. We thought why not treat repeating sections as ‘Child’ records within the main ‘Parent’ record.

And so, it has come to pass that a new type of data collector – a special data collector, called ‘One-to-Many’ – was introduced to the AppCan platform.

When building a form using a ‘One-to-Many’ data collector, the record submissions behave uniquely in ‘View Data’; essentially, they’re chopped up into separate rows, based upon each use of a repeating section within the record. Consequently, you end up with multiple rows (‘Child’) from a single (‘Parent’) submission, each sharing a common UID ref from the main record, and most importantly, each with its own header information, replicated from the Parent record too.

With the data now cleverly disaggregated within ‘View Data’ you’re free to use AppCan’s ‘Send’ functionality to push ‘Child’ records to other Mobile users, which they in turn can complete providing additional process data.

In utility construction it’s always tempting to talk about ‘reinstatement’ tasks as an example where you might use this approach, but really, this has numerous applications for managing sub-processes such as timesheets, plant returns, track-sheets, surveys etc.

Reporting improvements are never far from our thinking too, so you won’t be surprised to discover this new type of data collector, and its unique data structure, greatly simplifies PowerBI data models.

Just another example of AppCan pursuing the limits of possibility with digital mobile data. What’s stopping you? – try it out!