I was about to add a very similar wish, so thanks for having this one! I started a thread for speculating about this on the (apparently now rather quiet) discussion forum at the Projects site. Here's what I said there, just to consolidate:

I'm building a site to track academics through their careers at various universities, and to trace mentor/student relationships between these academics. For simple cases, data forms and a newPage module work well; however, most are not simple cases, and I'm running into problems when I want to add many students to one mentor, or several universities to someone advanced in their career — without cluttering up the form for people who only need one field of each.

What I'd like to see is an "add row" function built into the data forms somehow: an option to insert a button that, when clicked, would duplicate the indicated fields. (There would need to be some kind of suffix added, I guess: student-1, student-2, … student-i.)

Ideally, we would even be able to treat joined fields as a single item for the purposes of this duplication, which would allow users to save, e.g., additional address blocks (name, street, city, state), whether for shipping gifts or, in my case, for university names and locations.

Shane's solution to have the form automatically add a new row when the indicated field has content is pretty sweet, but may be beyond me. Maybe the wrapping of several fields could be done using something like tsangk's conditional blocks, which I also don't quite understand.

That said, I'm willing to put in a good amount of time coding and debugging to create a new javascript CSI that would expand on the existing framework for the [[Forms]] module — perhaps similar to the way James Kanjo has extended the [[newPage]] module here. Though I'm no James or Kenneth, I think I could make some headway, especially with a project giving me deadline pressure.

But — despite my best efforts — I haven't been able to find the code that drives the original [[Forms]], so I'm working in the dark. Is there a place I should be looking?

Thanks!

Hm, I was afraid of that. Good to know.

That said, outside of the process I was suggesting, is the idea for the extended behavior similar enough to yours to leave it paired together in this wish? Or do you see them as different enough to merit a new wish?

So essentially, you want to enable arrays in data forms.

Two propositions:

• An "array" field type;
• A boolean "array" option for all fields (except PagePath).