Generic Clinical System Forum

While it is possible to have multiple parents for a form, it is not recommended to do so and it will cause problems with pullthroughs being unable to resolve the correct parent.
As we have been caught out by this issue recently we wrote a quick bit of SQL to list child forms and their parents so we could identify any other problem forms.

SELECT DISTINCT
SCF.ID AS 'Child Form ID', SCF.NAME AS 'Child Form',
MCF.NAME AS 'Parent Form' FROM tbllinkedform
JOIN tblformlibitem SFLI ON SFLI.ID = Slave_FormLibItem_ID
JOIN tblFormLibItem MFLI ON MFLI.ID = FormLibItem_ID
JOIN tblcustomform SCF ON SCF.ID = SFLI.BaseFormID
JOIN tblcustomform MCF ON MCF.ID = MFLI.BaseFormID
ORDER BY SCF.NAME ASC, MCF.NAME ASC

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David Wykes
Software Engineer
Clincial Technology Center
Ninewells

Thanks David,

What version are you running ? We had 1069 as our training version. Multiple parents were OK with that. When we moved to 140x, we found we could no longer do this. On querying this, Axsys informed us that feature had been removed - multiple parents are no longer possible. Bit of a B if you need to upgrade.

Mike.

Mike,

We are currently on v1452SP1

It was buried in the manual that, while you could have multiple parents to a form, it was not recommended and that doing so would prevent you from using pull throughs on the child forms.

It depends on what your reasons are for using multiple parents, but for our needs we duplicated the design of the child (Form A) and created a new parent to go with it. The user enters data into Form A and a script on save creates/updates that data on an instance of Form B so every Form A has a corresponding Form B associated with it.
In our case Form A is Multi-instance great-grandchild where both it's parent & grandparent are multi-instance too and we needed a way to summarise all instances of farm A in one place for the users.

We make the controls on Form B Disbaled so the user cannot change them and we create a Patient Data Link automatically that the user can use to get to the source Form A.

David

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David Wykes
Software Engineer
Clincial Technology Center
Ninewells

Thanks David :-)