Request for the ability to auto-hide empty fields in customized email notifications

Hi JotForm Team,

I know you guys had been working very hard and probably have a very long To-Do List to be taken care of, but let me give you some suggestions here as this could make your email feature more usable to wider range of users:

1. Default Table Locking should at least provide sub-grouping of fields based on the Heading elements added by the user. For example, when you LOCK the HTML Data Table, you should, by default, include also the Heading part of the form group the fields in the email for higher readability. Without this feature, those long forms with many fields will be very hard to be read by the recipient of the email. When rendering as HTML Data Table, the sub-headers for sub-grouping should look something like that:

<td colspan="2"><h4>The Sub Heading Goes Here</h4></td>

2. Use HTML's id attribute for higher flexibility. In the programming point of view, you just can't make use of the field caption to identify the HTML table row -- use id for <tr> instead regardless of <td> contents of the row. Through this way, your program logic will show/hide based on row id + {fieldValue}, not based on field caption (or any other risky means). Namely, if {fieldValue} is empty, hide the <tr> that contains it. Note that if you can detect the <tr> container of the {fieldValue}, you don't even need to use the id attribute at all.

Anyway, the above are just suggestions. Your team may have more other concerns that we don't know. But hope that you'll find them useful. Keep up the great work!

P/S: Yes, I need this feature too.

Thank you for your suggestions.
Before submitting it to our development team, I wanted to ask you some questions to clearly understand your requests:

1. When you say Default Table Locking, are you referring to the feature that allows to Hide Empty fields on Email Alerts?. If this is correct, you would like to have a way to add this feature, but only to a portion of the email notification, that can be selected by the heading for example?

2. I understand that you want to use the id attribute, but I'm not sure if you're still referring to the email notification. If this is the case, you would want to have conditional logic to show/hide fields in the notification. Or are you referring to how the conditional logic currently works and suggesting that we use the row id instead of the label caption?

I apologize if I misunderstood anything.

We will await for your response.
Thank you.

Yes, I was referring to that post of course, but what I meant was, you also need to auto-group the fields according to the Heading elements added by the users or else your default table locking format will be very messy and unreadable, especially for those forms with many fields. This could help to reduce the need of customizing the email template.

I wasn't only referring to email notification but also auto-responder -- I thought you guys are using the same engine to render the email content? Yes, I suspect that your programmers want to LOCK the data table in order for the empty fields to be hidden is because they need the field caption to identify it. So I suggest to your programmers to use <tr> id instead of field caption (if in case I was right).

If you're not a programmer, you might need to show this post to your programmers, they might be able to understand what I was saying.

When I say "I need this feature too", I mean in general, I want the empty fields in the customized email to be hidden too. As long as you can provide this feature, it is not necessary for you to follow my technical advice.

Check this out, this is my customized email auto-responder with sub-headers to group fields (but unable to hide empty fields):

Thank you for the explanation.
I went ahead and submitted your suggestions to our development team so they can evaluate them.

If an update regarding this matter shows up, you'll be notified here.
Best Regards.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I also submitted your request for the ability to hide empty fields on customized email notifications.

Yes, as you can see, by having the sub-header as the separator, the email content looks much cleaner and easier to read, so users will definitely want to customize it. In short, your programmers  need to allow full customization by simply removing any HTML Table Row with empty field value when the Enable option is set.

Thank you.

Thank you for the insights, Antonio.  We'll surely take note of these details.  Your suggestions indeed have been very helpful and we really appreciate it.

Feel free to let us know if you have more concerns.

Thanks and warm regards,
-Liyam

@crossland, please note that your question has been moved to a new thread, to prevent confusion with the topic of this thread, and the feature request that is being handled here.

Your question can be found here: http://www.jotform.com/answers/584073

We will assist you there shortly. Thank you.