Repeating parent form containing repeating child form

[David Edwards]

Hi all,

I'm currently trying out a few things before starting a project, just to see what's possible...

I need to make a parent form which repeats daily, with a child form which repeats 0 to x times (where x is some preset limit which will likely be < 10).

I've got it working in a naff way with a repeating parent form containing an instance table, but I'm not crazy about it because:

• I can't disable the "Add+" button on the parent form when the x limit is reached. This would require a page refresh on the parent form whenever an instance is added, which I've been unable to do. But even if I could do a refresh, it'd be no good for new parent forms which haven't been saved yet. So the best I've been able to do is let the user click "Add+" after the limit's been reached, then in the instance pop-up, disable the "Save" button and display a message like "Sorry, the limit's been reached for today.". Like I said ... naff.
  
  
• I don't like how the instance table popup sometimes closes on save and sometimes remains, showing the record's dashboard. Too unintuitive - I prefer hard guide rails.

So I'm wondering if there's another way to do it.

I was hoping to make a repeating event containing both parent and child forms in, then make the parent form non repeating, but the child form repeating, but it doesn't look like that's possible.

So thought I'd float it here and see if anyone's got any ideas.

Thanks,

David.

[David Edwards]

Update: I was looking at different ways of combining repeating forms and events earlier, and I realised I'm over complicating it - all I need to do is combine the parent/child forms into one form with 10 hidden sections for the child part. So I'll probably go with that now.

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From: redca...@googlegroups.com <redca...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of David Edwards <dw...@hotmail.com>
Sent: 16 March 2026 14:28
To: redcap open <redca...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [REDCap Open] Repeating parent form containing repeating child form

 

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[Peter Macisaac]

David,

Not quite sure what your requirements are, however  in a previous project I needed to register families/households  and identify their children living in each, and as then recruit and register the all the  children to be the actual subjects of the study.

So for the recruitment and study  management we had the household and head of household as our subjects of interest and for the study phase the children were the subjects of interest. 

This was achieved by  creating two separate but related related redcap projects -  Households and Children

Once the parents consented,  we  created a record for each  the children in the household project (via a repeating form) and  when these forms when save would generated a unique URL in the format that REDcap would execute to  generated the Childs  record in the children project (where all the recurring study instruments were located). The URL contained data about the household ID, so we could generate an ID for the child that linked them to their household. 

That way we could have as many children as needed for each family (like a repeating form) and seperate cleanly the data for recruitment, household and research management, and the data for the children (who were the subjects of the study) while maintaining  the relational link between children and families for analysis and achieving a minimum of  data duplication and reentry

The research assistants were local community people using REDcap on mobile devices  so the whole thing had to be simple to use,  workflow driven and  with with  a minimum of cognitive load and processing on the data collectors.  

Happy to discuss further, however it was a complex solution but meant we could use REDcap for both recruitment and study phases and eliminate need for excel spreadsheets and other project management tools - it was all in one place for the project manager

Peter Macisaac

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/redcap_open/AS1PR10MB5507376BF2F848690649124CBF40A%40AS1PR10MB5507.EURPRD10.PROD.OUTLOOK.COM.

[David Edwards]

Hi Peter,

That sound like an absolute work of genius... respect!

I'm afraid I've misled you with the terms Parent and Child there. I was using those terms just to illustrate the structure of the forms, but in this case, the parent represents a day of treatment and the child represents one individual treatment (i.e. we reckon there might be up to ~5 treatments a day in practice, but I want to accommodate 10 just in case).

Given the paucity of development time available to me, I think in my case I'll be better off going with the "10 hidden sections on one form" approach.

But I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this clever approach which you undertook in your study. I hope to keep this idea in my back pocket for future studies which might fit that pattern, in which case I'll be back here begging you for more details!

Thank you very much,

David.

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From: Peter Macisaac <pe...@macisaacinformatics.org>
Sent: 16 March 2026 21:22
To: David Edwards <dw...@hotmail.com>
Cc: redcap open <redca...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [REDCap Open] Repeating parent form containing repeating child form

 

[David Edwards]

Forgot to reply to all again ... SMH ....

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From: David Edwards <dw...@hotmail.com>
Sent: 17 March 2026 02:08
To: Peter Macisaac <pe...@macisaacinformatics.org>

Subject: Re: [REDCap Open] Repeating parent form containing repeating child form

 

Well I've tried dogged persistence for the same reasons, but I've never come up with anything that clever. Some people just have a gift for this stuff. I usually end up burning up a lot of time trying and failing different workarounds. Luckily, the need doesn't come around that often, or I'd be out of a job!

Thanks again for your reply.

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From: Peter Macisaac <pe...@macisaacinformatics.org>
Sent: 17 March 2026 01:29
To: David Edwards <dw...@hotmail.com>

Subject: Re: [REDCap Open] Repeating parent form containing repeating child form

 

David,

More dogged persistence and trial and error to squeeze as much juice out of REDCap off the shelf, as I don’t have the skills in API use and programming.

I was pleased with the user feedback which is its own reward.

Thanks for you kind comments

Peter