Conditional population of field values

My form is primarily based on the inspection of products. 

I have a field in which the item number of a product is entered. 

Next on the form is a text field for a product description. 

Is there a way to set up the form to populate the product description based on the item number entered in the previous field? 

More importantly, I have a few thousand items that this situation applies to. Is there a way to load item numbers and correlating product descriptions in bulk? Setting up each one individually would be a massive effort and consume a lot of time.

Assuming this is at all possible, how many items could I realistically perform this rule with? Is a few thousand items too many to pull this off without breaking the form or making it too slow to respond? 

Many thanks in advance for your help! 

> Is there a way to set up the form to populate the product description based on the item number entered in the previous field?

Yes, you can utilize conditional logic of our forms, and insert a value into a field based on what is entered on another field:

https://www.jotform.com/help/268-How-to-Insert-Text-or-Mathematical-Calculation-into-a-Field-Using-Conditional-Logic

> More importantly, I have a few thousand items that this situation applies to. Is there a way to load item numbers and correlating product descriptions in bulk?

I'm afraid not, our conditions can only be created one by one, manually. There is no way to create conditions in bulk, but if you will have many product numbers offering the same product description, you may want to try using our "contains" and "starts with" type of matching on the IF statement of your conditions.

> Assuming this is at all possible, how many items could I realistically perform this rule with? Is a few thousand items too many to pull this off without breaking the form or making it too slow to respond?

I hate to give a politician's response, but that really depends. It might be too much for your form, but your form might also continue working fine even with a thousand conditions. This all depends on multiple factors, such as how many form fields there are, how many conditions you use, and how these conditions are set up.

When conditions are executed, form must go through each form field, and compare it with each condition, to see what matches the conditions and what does not. Having a large number of conditions with only a few form fields should process quickly. Having a large number of fields without any conditions should also process quickly. But having even a dozen or two of form fields and a huge number of conditions would most likely cause performance issues.

In the simplest way you can consider as if the conditions and form fields mutually multiply.

Similarly, not all conditions can process with the same speed. The "is equal to" type of matching processes rather quickly, while conditions with "contains" type of matching are slower.

Finally, the speed of your form will also depend on the targeted device where you intend to use it. From practical standpoint, if you intend to use it on mobile devices, please try to use as few conditions as possible. Conditions are CPU intensive, and while they may seem as being processed instantly on a desktop computer, the lag on mobile phones which have considerably weaker processors is much more noticeable the more conditions there are to be processed.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for your response and I appreciate the well detailed reply. 

You are kindly welcome, and if there is anything else we can do to help, please don't hesitate opening another support thread in our forum anytime:

https://www.jotform.com/contact

Cheers