Configure a Control to Only Display If Relevant

Some types of controls can be configured to only display if they are relevant to the goals in a policy model. This is a good way to ensure that only the questions that need to be shown to collect enough information to make a decision are displayed, thereby avoiding making the user answer unnecessary questions. The controls that can be configured in this way are inputs, containers, entity collects, entity containers, and reference relationships.

To specify that a control should only display if relevant:

1. On the Interview tab, select the control in the screen list or the screen layout view.
2. Click the control state button (the button has an icon with three horizontal blue rectangles ). For input controls, this button has text which toggles between Mandatory, Optional, Show if, and Read only if. For all other control types, the text of this button is Show if.
3. In the drop-down window, select the option control collects relevant information in the drop-down list next to the Show if link.
   
   
   
   Note that this is equivalent to clicking the Show if link to change it to Hide if and then selecting control does not collect relevant information in the drop-down list.
   
   
   
   

Notes about using relevancy:

• Relevance can be applied to individual questions or to groups (containers).
  
  
• Relevance can be influenced by controls on the same screen, and on other screens.
• Relevance can also be used as a behavior condition for controls (that is, to drive read-only and optionality of controls).

Tip: If you have a label that you only want to be shown when an associated input is displayed based on relevancy, put both controls in a container and specify that the container should only be shown if relevant.