Best practice to tackle multi-select on a form when there are many options?

Marketing & Content Hub Lead Capture Tools
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Hi - so we have a customer form we want to move over to HubSpot and I’m currently in the process of building it. In it the customer must list all the countries they do business in. So there may be more than one answer, therefore a dropdown field won’t work. A multiple checkboxes field lists every single country in one very long column, which is crazy. The only way I can see to work-around this is to make it a multi-line text field and give up the idea of being able to see data such as x number of customers deal in country x (as everyone will type out a country name differently I imagine!). The main purpose of this question is to determine if a customer deals with a sanctioned country, each form submission is looked at independently, so a typo or abbreviation isn’t going to break everything, I just don’t think it’s the best way to set up the question. Any ideas? Thanks :slight_smile:

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Hi @M_Kelly,

HubSpot does indeed unfortunately not have a form field type that looks like a single line text and auto-suggests options as you enter a word, then would let you select them.

If you don’t want the long multiple checkboxes list (understandably), you could use the free text field, like you proposed - and then hook this up to one of HubSpot’s AI features.

For example, in a workflow, you could use the “Data Agent: Custom Prompt”, feed it the free text field, then ask it to output the matching values from an actual multiple checkboxes property that you’re using in the background and not exposing on forms.

You could write the output to that checkboxes property using “Edit record”.

Best regards

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Hi @M_Kelly :waving_hand: It’s great to see you back on the HubSpot Community!

Thanks for asking and thanks so much @karstenkoehler for the workaround! :orange_heart:

As Karsten mentioned, HubSpot doesn’t currently support conditional options for forms. I’ve noticed a similar idea already present in our Ideas Forum: Multi-Select Drop Down Field for Forms . To contribute, you can upvote the existing idea and share more details about your specific use case in the comments.

Another workaround would be to keep it as a multiple checkboxes property for reporting integrity, and improve usability with a multi-step form.

I’d love to hear form our Top Experts: Hi @Josh and @danmoyle can you think of another workaround to help @M_Kelly, please?

Thanks so much and have a wonderful day!
Bérangère

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Thanks @karstenkoehler … that sounds interesting, I’ll investigate that option further, thank you!

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Thanks @Berangere . I’ve upvoted and commented in the Ideas Forum. This form is already a multi-step form, I’ll investigate Karstens suggestion, thanks!

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Thanks @Berangere but honestly I don’t have an idea better than what @karstenkoehler mentioned for @M_Kelly. I think taking advantage of the AI tools + data hub features is the best bet here.

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Thanks @danmoyle … gosh it seems a little crazy to have to get into workflows and AI Agents etc just to create a fairly basic form field type arrghhh. Anyway, hopefully the Ideas forum post gets picked up on in the not too distant future :slight_smile:

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Have you also considered possibly having conditional logic and grouping countries into territories first, such as Europe, APAC etc. This way, you can have the list of countries within that region appear if they choose first territories they operate in, which then opens up a list of relevant countries? We have done this in our portal, as some of our BDMs work within specific territories, and some of the countries flagged as sanctioned are then flagged to our solutions team?