Pre-General Availability: 2025-07-15

Optimize custom rules by defining relationships between repeating forms

You can now define a relationship between two simple repeating forms (child and parent). This reduces the amount of rule threads that run when using aggregate functions, which are used to get data from other form instances, and improves the system performance.

When you create custom rules on a repeating form item, the new Relation Mapping Definition field is available in the Rule Editor. This field is displayed below the Variables section and allows you to select one of your previously defined variables as a relation item. This relation item acts as a link between the target repeating form, which is considered the child table, and a parent repeating form table.

With the Relation Mapping Definition, the rule no longer runs for every form instance in the target table after an update. This reduces the rule processing time in two key ways:
  • If a user updates the rule variable item on the parent form, the rule execution logic loads data of the relation item and generates a list of instances in the child table that need to be evaluated and updated. As a result, only the corresponding instances of the child form are evaluated and updated.
  • If a user updates the rule variable item on a child form, the rule runs only on the current instance.

You can find additional information in the Rules Developer Guide after the Release Assessment Environment (RAE) upgrade.

Parent topic: Rules management