The product choice field is a key part of institution-level application templates!
The need for a product choice field is twofold: on the one hand, it allows staff to designate which of the full list of open programmes and classes should make use of a particular template, and on the other, it lets applicants indicate which of those classes they wish to apply to.
But it's not all about application templates, there's also the ability to add the product choice field to forms and events, thus allowing candidates to indicate which products they’re interested in when submitting a form or an event registration, which in turn automatically associates their profiles with those products.
To staff users, the advantage is huge:
Firstly, you get to ditch the usage of cumbersome dropdown fields that you must continually remember to update from top to bottom due to the transient nature of classes and courses. Why? Because, by default, product choice fields only display classes and courses that are currently in the states “New” or “Applications open”, and therefore only require you to add newly-created classes and courses to it.
Secondly, there is no longer any need to set up countless automated workflows to add profiles to products based on the submitters' answers, as one workflow suffices.
All in all, this is a dramatic time saver! 😳
The settings for the product choice field in forms and events are slightly more streamlined because there is no need to specify whether the selected class or course is the submitter's primary or secondary choice, but everything else is the same:
Similarly, in the spirit of further streamlining our processes, when it comes to building an automated workflow to add profiles to classes, it's no longer compulsory to add an extra condition, meaning that you can go straight to the action for maximum efficiency and ease, as demonstrated below:
Nevertheless, it's also possible to use the product choice field as a condition in form and event automation workflows, although that'll only be necessary if, out of the multiple classes and courses available in the product choice field, you only want a select few to trigger the "Add profile to product" automation. Here's an example:
Speaking of which, as you can probably tell from the previous two screenshots, we made some tweaks to the automation “Add profile to product” to make it more flexible, and the result is that it can now be customized to add profiles to the products selected in the product choice field through the new option "The products selected in the product choice fields", or, alternatively, only add them to a specific group of classes and courses of your choosing:
The "STATE AND SUBSTATE" menu only lists prospect states (except prospect::started application). If you're interested in revising the states that are available for selection, please contact our Support team.
Finally – last, but not least – by virtue of all of these changes, we introduced a new email substitution tag: “Event or Form product choices”, which can be applied to any related email templates, such as reminder emails (just to name an example), to easily include all of the product choices selected in the product choice field. 📨
