Did You Know conditional variables (triggers) give you greater control over softproof elements?

Conditional variables are variables which can be ‘triggered’ to behave a certain way based on the value of another variable.  These ‘Trigger’ Variables can provide more options while maintaining a cleaner and controlled interface for the user.

To illustrate with an example, imagine a business card with multiple phone number fields that can be edited by a user during proofing. Each phone number field has a dropdown list above it of available phone types (i.e. “Office”, “Cell”, “Fax”). If the user selects “Cell” for the first phone type, then they would no longer have the option to select “Cell” for the other phone types. The first selection triggered a behavior (to hide “Cell” as an option) in other variables. That’s what conditional variables are used for.

In addition, conditional variables can be set up with compliance features. For example, user groups and conditional variables could be used to require users in certain states to input a license number on their variable marketing collateral. Conditional variables give you more options for compliance control on personalized products.

Benefits to the Clients

• Achieve more granular control of variable elements
• Enforce stricter compliance and business rules on variable collateral

How It Works

Conditional variables are set up in the Soft Proof Projects page in the back end, under the Proofing tab.

Once you have uploaded and set up your soft proofing project variables, you will need to ensure that you have the variables you wish to be used as conditional variables set up as either DropDownList, RadioButton, or CheckBox type variables. 

Select the Manage Triggers button in the Variables section. You’ll see a list of all the variables that can be used to trigger conditional variable behavior. To begin apply trigger condition rules, you will select a value from below the trigger variable that you wish to use. Once a variable is selected, the right side will populate with options to set trigger rules, in other words, what will change once this selection is made during personalization.  

Possible triggers include controlling whether other variables will show, hide, or hide with no value. You can also make it so that selecting an option on one variable will remove specific options for selection on another dropdown list variable.

You have the ability to not only control individual variables, but also the Groups of variables set up in the Build Form Layout. These Groups will be located at the top of the Trigger Rules before the individual variables are listed.

On the far right, you will also notice that you have the ability to hide or show values of other dropdownlist variables based on the value of the selected trigger variable value.

Once you have completed setting up all of the trigger rules, just exit out of the Trigger modal and be sure to save the softproof project.

If you have any questions or need support, you can contact our support team at:  support@propago.com or 512-887-5847

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