When you open an App its always nice to see a few metrics that summarize the current situation.

Goal

In Education Matters we want to show the metric ‘Active Children’. This should be the number of children in the system with the Status set to Active.

Prerequisites

• An Object called Children with at least these fields:

  Field	Type
  Name	Text
  Status	Select List (Options: Active, Not Active)

• A form to add a Child record

Step One: Create an Entity Object

First we need to add a new object to represent the entire system.

We can call it Entity and add a Name text field.

We also need to create a connected record field called Children with a connection to the Children object. The rule should be 1 Entity connects Multiple Children.

Now that Entity has Children connected we can use the Formula Field Type to count them. However, the Formula field needs to reference a number field on the connected record. Our Children Object does not have a valid number field, so we can add a number field called To Count.

Back on the Entity, we’ll add the field Active Children with the field type Formula. Change the Type to Count and select the Field as Children -> To Count.

Notification: In this case the actual value of the `To Count` is not important. Count will be the same if the values are 0 or any other value. For the other formula field operations (average, sum, min, max) it's important to consider the values.

Lastly we need to add a filter to the formula field. We’ll use Status equals Active so that only children with the Active status show in our count.

Step Two: Set up your Entity

Now that the object is ready let’s add an Entity Record with the Name Education Matters.

Next we need to make sure that all Children get added to the Education Matters Entity. To do this we can add a Record Rule to the Add Child Form. This will assign new children to the Education Matters Entity.

To create the record rule we need a Data Collection for our Entity. Because we only have 1 entity we can set [Select] to [First Record].

Now we can go into our form and add the record rule. Let’s choose update record as the Action and then Set Entity to our Entity Data Collection with the current selection.

Notification: If you have multiple forms to add Children you will need to add record rules to each.

Conclusion

We now have everything set up for the Active Children Count. It will increase as more children are added or when the Child’s status is changed.