Capturing structured, repeatable data is essential for many workflows, from property audits to equipment inspections. However, some scenarios require additional repetition, such as rooms within apartments or components within a machine.

The most common scenario involves capturing a single set of repeatable fields in the classical Parent-Child repeat of the data. A scenario to better explain this is where you use a repeatable page or a table to capture the names of attendees to a work site safety briefing. If you use a table to capture the names of people in attendance, each person will occupy a single row in that table.

The nesting of repeatable data takes this one step further. Instead of allowing you to capture a single set of repeat data, you can capture repeat data within a repeatable data set using our nesting repeatable data feature.

A real-life scenario would be if you are doing a property inspection of apartments in multiple apartment blocks (Each apartment is a child of the parent element, which is the building the apartment is in). To achieve this on our platform, you would use a Table field (Child – apartments) within another Table (Parent – buildings), a “Table within a table” in essence. 

Although you can create a custom template to output your repeatable data in the format you desire, there are some caveats when dealing with nested repeatable data. This article attempts to demystify using nested repeats and explains some of the feature’s limitations.

Use Cases

Suppose you’re a property manager who needs to audit a building containing multiple apartments and rooms in each apartment.

Or repairing equipment on-site with numerous components, each with a subset of parts to be recorded.

Or, for any reason, you need to capture a set of repeating data that also requires another set of repeats within it.

This is where nesting a Table field within another Table field should come in handy.

When designing your form, add a Table field (parent) and populate it with additional fields. Then, drag and drop another Table field (child) into the parent table and populate it.

Custom Data Output

In addition to our pre-built templates for swift PDF outputs (Classic Grey, App, and Smart Layout), you can fully customize your templates.

Below is an example of an App Layout output.

However, if you choose to create your own. The standard repeat syntax can be used in custom Word or Excel templates to legibly display repeatable and non-repeatable captured data.

i.e., in a table:

Or, section:

{{!REPEATSTART}}

    ...content to be repeated goes here {{dataname}}

{{!REPEATEND}}

The following example demonstrates a custom Word template using repeat row syntax for parent and child repeats and non-repeatable captured data in a few configurations.

To output data from your parent and nested child repeats, you don’t need double “REPEATSTART” or nested “REPEATROW” tags anywhere in your template.

With a custom PDF output looking like this…

Limitations

Nested repeats support the following:

• Maximum of 2 levels (parent repeat > child repeat).
• Configuration of a Table field (child) within another table (parent) ONLY.
• The child table doesn’t support Populate from a Data Source.