Hi.

I am evaluating OnTime for our dev team.  I'm trying to decide on the best means of setting up the tool.  If a defect is logged against a product, the fix may affect several area. For instance, it could affect software running on different processors, or there could be a software change as well as and FPGA firmware change required to fix it.

 My first thought was to created a  custom field called "Components affected by fix" and then to create a mulitple choice pick list with all the choices for a specific product.   However, I would also like to require that the user enter the "fixed in" version for each component. I don't want to created a picklist of versions as it would be too hard to maintain. Therefore I'd like for a text version field to come up for each component selected in the pick list.  Is this possible? I have not been able to find a way to implement it.

 I am thinking that the other solution would be to open a related defect if more than one component is affected. If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd appreciate the inputs.

Thanks!

Hello Iam,

There is currently no way within OnTime to have a text field be displayed as a result of a picklist.

I see that you'd prefer not to create picklists based on 'versions', yet it seems to me as if the best way to accomplish your goal would be to use dependent picklists. For instance, you could create a 'parent' picklist that allows your users to select a component, and then a 'child' picklist that would generate component versions based on the value of the parent.

 
If you'd like to have the ability to generate text fields based on multi picklist selections, I suggest that you submit your idea through our Customer Portal. Our developers will take your submission into consideration when developing future versions of OnTime.
 

Thanks for the timely response. We'll find an alternative implementation. No big deal. 

Tom Harder:

I see that you'd prefer not to create picklists based on 'versions', yet it seems to me as if the best way to accomplish your goal would be to use dependent picklists. For instance, you could create a 'parent' picklist that allows your users to select a component, and then a 'child' picklist that would generate component versions based on the value of the parent.

I have been thinking about the issue of parent and child multi-picklists.

The issues that I found was that if you have a parent multi-picklist, then for the child all options are diaplayed, even ones relating to items that are not picked in the parent list- this is not really logical (but probably the simplest to implement).

The logical variation would that in the child list only items which have a parent picked would display. Though another issue is that it might no be clear which item relates to which parent (in the case of versions).

Also if one was wanting to use it with only the parent list being a Multi-picklist and the child not (except you might want one from each parent group) it becomes more complicated with the gui - a different sort of control might be needed. - a list (or box) of picklists ?

The case I had thought about this is with components and sub -components. I ended up making it a "non-multi" picklist.

I know that these might not general be the best way to go, and might not be common. Does any of this make sense or seem practical?

 

Hello MagicM,

I don't use large component picklists within OnTime myself, but I can definitely see how the option for multi-select wouldn't work with our current design. I've submitted a feature request for some way of displaying only the selected child values when using multi-select picklists. I suspect other OnTime users see this same dilemma, and it seems logical to me.