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Legacy: Creating a drill-down search system
Legacy: Creating a drill-down search system
Bryan Nye avatar
Written by Bryan Nye
Updated over a week ago

This article describes a legacy feature of MetaLocator and is no longer supported for new implementations. Please use the Interface Builder going forward.

MetaLocator can display a search using related, hierarchical lists that allow your users to pick from a series of values that then reveal other related values. A common examples is a physician or medical directory used to find a doctor, where you may first choose a Practice Area such as "General Practice", then a Specialty such as "Pediatrics".  Your search interface might look like this:

To set this up, let's first look at our import file.  It includes the typical location data, but also includes two custom fields: PracticeArea and Specialty, formatted as shown here:

Those columns include the Specialty areas practiced by those physician locations in a comma-delimited list.

Once imported, we need to set two options.  First, we need to tell the system to generate drop-down lists of the unique values in those lists.  Find this setting under Form Settings and set it to "Yes"

Now that we're generating the list, we need to display it in our form.  Do that by adding the form template Category to the Search Form Format, also under Form Settings:

Once added there, you can preview your interface, and you should see the two new lists generated for you as shown in the video above.  That's all there is to it!

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