Creating a Linked Checklist App

In this post, I’m going to be showing you how to create a linked checklist app to a parent app. Good reasons for doing this is if you want the flexibility to add and remove items that you can’t get from a grid field, another is that the grid field doesn’t look good because of the number of fields you want to use to track it, it also offers more capability of reporting and tracking items

The example I am using is a simple project parent app and a standard project checklist, this is just the base of what you will need but feel free to experiment with your own apps and share the results 

First, you’re going to want to create a child app, fill in the standard requirements with what’s needed. Then you can add the fields you want, the ones I have used I find are a good example of fields you might want:

Item – where to enter the checklist item

Area – what area the item is referenced under, I've used Project/Team/Tools, other popular options can be phases, stages, gates. Design methods like agile and waterfall processes

Owner – this is who is responsible for the completion of this item

Owner Email – this is the email of the owner, not only does it allow for people to contact them for questions but also allows you to send workflow triggered notifications

Comments – this is where you can enter any relevant information you want to capture (or a notes field)

Projected Completion – this is the desired date you want it to be completed

Actual Completion – this is the actual date the item was completed

Required – this is if the item is mandatory and is a blocker if not completed

Status – this is a field saying whether the item is complete or not

Other fields that you could also have:

Overdue? - you can use an expression to see what the difference between the two dates are and calculate if the item was significantly overdue, if so you can have a notification sent to the project owner to tell them

Projected start or/and Actual start – if you add these dates there is a good opportunity to create a Gantt chart from a nice overview of scheduling

Involvement – a field to show who is involved in the completion of this item

Make sure to integrate the child to the parent

Once you have added your ideal fields you can then create the template, form and report. To create a good checklist app one of the main parts you want to focus on is creating a good list report. In my example below I have added every field to the list report, this allows for a great overview of the checklist without having to go into each individual record. You can also group and order the items a personalised way to the project owner

Another great advantage of adding all the fields to the list report is that you can use inline edit to update them, this allows for quick and easy management of the items without having to go into each individual record.

There are two ways for this checklist to function that I'll show here. The first is the simpler way, to create the app, link it to the parent and then the project manager creates the items he wants by adding them one at a time, this is quite long though, another way you could do this is to add them with an import (example below). To get the template of this add one record and then export that. Then add each item as a new row and import it. https://support.softools.net/hc/en-gb/articles/217248206-Importing-Records-with-a-csv-File

The second way is more automated, this is suited if you have a standard project checklist that you use across all projects. If so, you can use a copy and link workflow to create a list of standard items when you create a project. Below I will show you how to do it but for a more detailed explanation go to this article - https://support.softools.net/hc/en-gb/articles/115001427311-Update-Actions

Step 1) Create a master bit field in the child (Tick the exclude from templated copy! This stops it from copying the bit field value of true, if it didn't it would copy all the records across the other projects as their value would be true)

Step 2) Create the standardised checklist records in the child app and tick the master bit field for all these records (also you might want to set the record access rights to admin only so people to go around changing them)

Tip – you can remove the bit field once you have created the master list of records

Step 3) Create the workflow for the copy and link on record create (Make sure to tick the exclude templated copy in the workflow! also to ignore access rights)- https://support.softools.net/hc/en-gb/articles/115001443631-Workflow-Actions-for-Child-Parent-Record-Links

Tip – always test to see if it works

Once this is done you can then move onto reporting and pulling data up to the parent, generally good things to report on are completion and score. https://support.softools.net/hc/en-gb/community/posts/360041520531-Working-out-completion-with-an-automatic-Harvey-ball-indicator