Mar 21st, 2009, 10:48 AM
Yeah, I see the confusion.
The idea is that it will - or CAN - reduce the amount of work for you. In your case with the gender field, it won't help much - gender options are not going to change; the group will always have two elements: male and female. Where it's useful is with other information.
Here's a rather stark example from my own experience. I did a pretty big form for Boston Pizza a couple of months ago that contained a "Location" dropdown that lists several hundred locations around the US and Canada. The form contained 17 of these dropdowns because a registrant could technically be associated with that number of locations.
Problem was, the list I'd received was in limbo and over the course of development I needed to update it half a dozen times. With the old system, this meant I had to manually update 17 separate fields - which took half an hour each time. With Field Option Groups, I just needed to do it once.
Hope this clears things up a bit!
The idea is that it will - or CAN - reduce the amount of work for you. In your case with the gender field, it won't help much - gender options are not going to change; the group will always have two elements: male and female. Where it's useful is with other information.
Here's a rather stark example from my own experience. I did a pretty big form for Boston Pizza a couple of months ago that contained a "Location" dropdown that lists several hundred locations around the US and Canada. The form contained 17 of these dropdowns because a registrant could technically be associated with that number of locations.
Problem was, the list I'd received was in limbo and over the course of development I needed to update it half a dozen times. With the old system, this meant I had to manually update 17 separate fields - which took half an hour each time. With Field Option Groups, I just needed to do it once.
Hope this clears things up a bit!