The first form field you pull into a native report section determines your "Root Form". This root form influences how data is pulled from your database into your report.

Any form with a field included in the section after the root form has been established is referred to as a "Connecting Form".

Learn how root and connecting forms interact with each other and impact your report-building below.

An organization may want to create a report that shows all the services they provided to their participants within a time period. While it may seem intuitive to pull in a field from their Services Tier 2 form into the report first, our recommended best practice is to always start with a Tier 1 form. In this case, since the Services Tier 2 form would be linked to their Participant Tier 1 form, the Participant form would be the better choice for the root form (your organization may also refer to this as the Client Profile or Individual form).

If they organize participants into Households by linking their Household Tier 1 form to their Participant Tier 1 form, the Household Tier 1 form would actually be the ideal choice to establish as the root form. Each record of the Services Tier 2 form would be connected to a Participant Tier 1 record, and each participant would be associated with their Household Tier 1 record.

In the above example, the 'Household Record ID' field is the first field pulled into the report section, making the Household Tier 1 form the root form. The 'Participant Profile Record ID' field is brought in next, and you can see the Participant Profile Tier 1 form correctly indented under the Household form.

Once the first form field has been pulled into a report section, the root form will be established. The report section then must always have one column of data from the root form. As a result, you cannot change a section's root form. Instead, you can create a new report section and bring in the new root form's field first, then continue building your report.

To delete the report section with the previous root form, click the gear icon to the right of the section name and select 'Delete'.