Hi,

As you know, associated items column is a great tool for building real life business solutions. Everything in life is about connections and relationships and being able to create, manage and display associations is an essential and, probably, most commonly used feature of Ulimate Forms.

Associated items are ubiquitous, they can be found in expense reports, quotes, project management solutions, helps desks, practically anywhere, which is why we provide first class support for this functionality within Ultimate Forms. Special support is provided in Classic and Modern forms, Actions, Alerts, Print and other components. We also provide multiple ways of creating and editing child items:

• Via grid in forms
• Via pop-up forms
• In list views
• Through Actions

And now we are introducing a new way of creating associated items, probably the easiest of them all. With just a single click of a button, we can create a child item, based on the column values of the parent item (directly and/or through expressions, calculations and function results).

Let me give you an example. In our Employee Training solution (which you can install for free directly from within your Ultimate Forms app), we are providing the ability to sign up for a training course. Until now, it was only possible by running a manual action, which can be a little confusing, as you needed to open the manual actions pop-up and then click on the action. Not too complicated, but still requires explanations.

Using buttons, it's just a single click! Our new button type, Create associated item, is here to help. Let me show how it is configured:

• I have a list of Courses and a child list of Registrations. I will not be explaining how to set up the lists, there are plenty of tutorials talking about that.
• Drag and drop a new button just above the associated items column. Actually, it doesn't matter where the button is located. Moreover, it doesn't even need the associated items column to be visible on the form, as long as it exists in the list.
  
• In the button settings, set button type to "Create associated item". Then select the associated items column to work with and map the column values you want to set. Note that only associated items are supported, not associated documents.
  
• Note that you can use our Value Builder here, so all functions and calculations are supported. Also, you don't need to concern yourself with actually generating the connection between child and parent items, it is done automatically.
• Publish your form and voila! You can now simply click the button to create a new child item. Consider using permissions on the button to control who and when can see and use it
  

Create associated item button is great for scenarios when you need to create a new child item using pre-defined logic. Course registrations are a great example, as all we basically need here is the current user identity, which we can fetch using our [Current user] function. Another example could be creating a new child task based on the current status of a project. It's really up to you to decide what is going to be the scenario for you!