What are the benefits of the profile field type cascade select ?
This field type gives the chance to display hierarchical structures.
Imagine having multiple products which belong to multiple categories. And every manager has their own responsibilities to a certain amount of products.
With this field type, everyone could check the correct boxes and show what products they manage. It's a good field type to display responsibilities.
Special configuration
This field type works only with CSV files.
First of all, you have to create a CSV file which contains all relevant data
Follow these set of rules:
the first line defines the header names of your CSV datasets
each distinct hierarchy level has to be defined as bundled pair of identifier (ID) + name (label)
each hierarchy level has it's own identifier (IDs) which has to be unique for the defined name (label)
the depth of the hierarchy is represented by the amount of those ID/label pairs within a CSV line
the amount of lines represents the amount of elements for each distinct hierarchy level
Your are free to use arbitrary names for the header names as well as for your identifier (ID) + name (label).
However, you have to keep a consistence structure within your chosen hierarchy. Also, your CSV files needs to use the .csv file extension.
Here's an example CSV hierarchy of how a user profile field 'Expertise' could look like …
cascade_selection_example.csvExpand source
ID_Category, Category, ID_Group, Group, ID_Item, Item
1, Business Administration, 1, Accounting & finance
1, Business Administration, 2, Corporate responsibility
1, Business Administration, 3, Resources management
2, Information Technology, 4, Adobe Photoshop
2, Information Technology, 5, HTML & CSS
2, Information Technology, 6, Javascript, 1, React
2, Information Technology, 6, Javascript, 2, Vue.js
1) Click on the Browse button and upload your .csv file.
Confluence needs write permission to the server for the upload to work.
or
2) Enter the absolute path to the file (.csv format) on your Confluence server [1].
Click on the Save button [2].
Re-enter the edit menu of your profile field, then click on Import [3].
The file will be uploaded and validated when you save the configuration, that's why the import works only after saving.
Q&A
What happens, if an user chose a select box stemming from a cascade select import within his Linchpin user profile, and a new version of the cascade select hierarchy gets imported missing the previously available and used select box?
All choices by users, which are not available with the current version of the imported hierarchy, won't be displayed anymore.
However, the original user choice is still saved and gets restored, once a new cascade select hierarchy has been imported which provides such check boxes again.
Why should I use wildcards and logical operators?
Because the source format can take on multiple values, you have to add wildcards and logical operators in the menu structure, if you plan to use this for the personalization of the menu. You can get more info on wildcards and logical operators here