Form rules for pre-actions

Overview

When setting up advanced rules, pre-actions refer to the actions that are performed before the main action. They allow you to define additional conditions that must be met or applied before executing the main action.  For example, you could have a rule with a main action that changes a field color to red for anything considered high severity. A pre-action could first clear the field color, followed by a rule condition that will set it to red if the severity is indicated as High or Very High.  

Example setup

Using the same example, let's set up pre-actions for a rule that changes the field color based on user input. In this scenario, we have a List field on our form with 5 answer choices: Very High, High, Med, Low, and Very Low. Our main action will be to change this field's color to red if High or Very High are selected. In the screenshot below, you can see how we first set the pre-action Clear Color, which will clear the field color depending on the Severity of the Issue. Then, we set up a rule condition that will change the color to red if the severity is Very High or High. This same logic can be accomplished with an Otherwise or Else condition with your rule, as shown here:  Using pre-actions often comes down to a matter of preference in rule setup.

Note

Pre-Actions will run no matter how the rule conditions are set up. So if you aren't careful, you can easily cancel out the actions of another rule.