You may have guessed by now that Axure challenges have displaced the Sunday Times puzzle in my life for the moment, and that the results are often more entertaining than they are useful on a daily basis.
However, here's something that I've seen discussed on the boards, and it's also come up at work: Having a bunch of checkboxes with extra stuff that shows up when some of them are checked. This is a pretty common request in web applications, and it's hard to do in Axure. The problem is that checkboxes, unlike radio buttons, can be checked/unchecked independently, so if you have a form with n checkboxes, there are 2^n combinations. That's a lot of combinations to manage.
My goal was to come up with a solution that met these criteria:
- The form should be able to handle an arbitrary number of checkboxes.
- Different checkboxes in the form might have different kinds of conditional content to display.
- The effort to set up the form should grow linearly, not exponentially, as the number of checkboxes grows.
- Enough of the complexity should be encapsulated in a master of some kind that a sufficiently motivated person can learn how to set one up quickly enough to make it worthwhile.
I'm pretty happy with the results as they're measured against the first three of these; whether I've nailed the fourth is an open question. I'd be happy for any feedback. The uploaded file contains an example form, a custom widget that can be used to build a new one, and a few pages of documentation and instructions. All you need is the widget; the solution uses no variables.
Thanks,
Jeff
