The Conditional Fields app enables administrators to hide and show fields in tickets to give agents and end-users a better user experience.
For example, if your ticket has a custom field that asks users to select an operating system, you can have two additional, hidden conditional fields—one listing the latest Mac OS X versions and the other listing the latest Windows versions. If the user selects Windows as their OS, the field listing the Windows versions is shown. The field listing the OS X versions remains hidden.
The Conditional Fields app is available as a Professional Add-on (as part of the Productivity Pack Add-on) and on Enterprise. Administrators can create and manage conditional fields for regular tickets or ticket forms (see Creating ticket forms to support multiple request types (Enterprise)).
Topics covered in this article:
- Installing the app in your Zendesk
- Making fields conditional in the agent interface
- Making fields conditional in the web form for end-users (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
- Making conditional fields required
Installing the app in your Zendesk
Administrators can install the app, and configure it to apply to agents in certain roles.
To install and configure the Conditional Fields app
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar then select Apps > Marketplace.
- Click the Conditional Fields application icon.
- On the app details page, click the Install App button on the upper-right side of the page.
- Configure the following items:
- Title: Required. Enter a title or accept the default title.
- Remove conflict prevention warnings: Optional. Select this if you don't want to receive conflict warnings.
- Enable role restrictions: Optional. Select this to restrict access to this app to certain roles. When you select this option you can then choose the roles that you want to have access.
Note: Role restrictions are typically not recommended for the Conditional fields app. If a role is restricted from the app, agents within that role will not see your configured conditions applied to ticket fields. They will simply see all fields on the ticket form. Administration for the conditional fields app is already locked down to the Admin role, so there is no need to worry about non-admin agents editing the configuration.
- Click Install.
Making fields conditional in the agent interface
Agents can use the agent interface in Zendesk to create or update tickets. Administrators can make fields in the agent interface appear only when the agent selects a certain value in another field.
Before you start, make sure you add all the fields you'll need in the ticket, including the fields that you want to make conditional. For more information, see the following topics:
- Adding and using custom ticket fields
- Creating ticket forms to support multiple request types (Enterprise)
To make a field conditional
- Make sure Agent is selected in the upper-right corner.
- Click the Conditional Fields icon (
) in the left sidebar.
- If you're using ticket forms, select the ticket form you want to work on.
- In the Fields column, select the form field that will control whether or not the conditional field is shown.
For example, when a user selects a specific value in the control field, the conditional field will be shown.
- In the Values column, select the value in the control field that the user must choose before the conditional field is shown.
- In the Fields to Show column, select the conditional field to show.
This field will be hidden by default. It'll only be shown when the user selects the specified value in the control field.
- Repeat the steps above to make other fields conditional.
Note: You can only use each field once. You can't reuse a field you've already set conditions for.
You can check your existing conditions in the left sidebar.
Making fields conditional in the web form for end-users (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
End-users can use the web form in the Help Center to submit support requests. If you have Guide Professional or Enterprise, you can make fields in the web form appear only when the end-user selects a certain value in another field.
To make fields conditional
- Select End-user in the upper-left corner of the screen.
- Make your fields conditional as described in Making fields conditional in the agent interface above.
Make sure to save your work.
- Click the Save and generate rules for the Help Center button in the left sidebar.
The app generates the code to insert in the HTML of your Help Center.
- Copy all the generated code into your computer's Clipboard or in a text file.
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Click the theme you want to edit to open it.
- Click the options menu, then select Edit Code.
You must have Guide Professional or Enterprise to edit your Help Center theme.
- In templates, select document_head.hbs.
- In the code editor, paste the code you generated above.
- Click Save in the top right to save your changes.
Making conditional fields required
You might want certain fields to be required, but still to only appear if they meet the conditions configured in your Conditional Fields app. To do so, you can set fields to required from within the Conditional Fields app.
You cannot use the required fields feature of the Conditional fields app for fields that are already marked as required in Zendesk. If you want to use the required feature of the Conditional Fields app, make sure your ticket fields aren't already marked as required for the same group (agents or end-users) from the Admin menu.

If a field is marked as required within the Conditional Fields app, and the app displays the field on a ticket, then agents won't be able to submit any update until they fill in the field. The Submit button will be grayed-out and unavailable until the required fields from the app are filled in.
- Click the Conditional Fields icon (
) in the left sidebar.
- Configure conditions as described in Making fields conditional in the agent interface or Making fields conditional in the web form for end-users (Guide Professional and Enterprise) above.
- In the Fields to show column, click Required in the top right.
- Check the box that appears next to the selected field.
- Click Done.
- Click Save.
136 Comments
What's a hard reset?
Hey Nate -
My apologies, the developer support team corrected me - I should've said a "hard refresh." They sent over this article to explain how to do it.
how to show/hide dropdown option based on the another dropdown value with conditional app?
Hi Suman!
Welcome to the Zendesk Community.
To make sure I understand what you're asking, you have two dropdowns, and you want the value that the person selects in dropdown A to determine which values show up in dropdown B, is that correct?
Hi Suman,
I sounds like what you are looking for is something we call Dependent Value Fields, where the value of a parent field controls the display of a subset of child field option values. This is particular good way to avoid creating separate fields for each set of option values, and using straight conditionality. A nightmare for reporting!
Take a look at our CloudSET Conditionality App. See towards the end where a Platform field is being used to show different O/S values appropriate for the platform:
This app is available from the Zendesk Paid App Marketplace. It's available on a FREE 30 Day trial.
Graham (CloudSET)
Hi,
Does the conditional fields functionality work with multi-select drop downs? I made 2 conditional fields and one (regular drop-down) worked perfectly, but the second one with the multi-select drop down didn't display properly. It wouldn't show any of the items in the drop down, but it had the title of the field.
I appreciate your help with this.
Hey Karen! Sorry for the late response! I'm checking into this for you. Stand by!
Hello Karen,
Thanks for your question. I verified with our product team and unfortunately, it looks like the conditional fields app does not support multiselect fields.
If this feature is important to your workflow I would encourage you to add this to our Product feedback page. Our developers check this page to determine where they should allocate development resources to improve the product. In your request be sure to explain how this would positively impact your current workflow. The more they understand how making that change would directly help you and your team the more likely that request is to get more attention.
You can find the product feedback forum here: Product Feedback
Hi all,
Would anyone be able to summarize the difference between the Zendesk and Cloudset apps?
At the moment it looks like they do roughly the same thing, but one is $6/agent/month and the other is $25 (would need the productivity pack).
Is there a specific reason I would want to go with the native Zendesk app?
Hi Michael,
I can have a stab at this ;-), and in fairness Zendesk's Enterprise/Productivity Pack covers three elements (1) Conditionality, (2) Forms, and (3) Pathfinder App, so they are not an exact match. Indeed, in regards to conditionality, CloudSET Conditionality covers the same basic conditional fields, but goes much further, including:
Zendesk include a specific capability to create and manage Forms, collections of fields. This can also be achieved using CloudSET Conditionality, although Zendesk's implementation exclusively supports field ordering per form.
Zendesk also bundle the excellent Pathfinders App, which provides insights into which articles and searches were done prior to submitting a ticket. CloudSET have no equivalent functionality or plans to do so.
Hope this helps.
Graham (CloudSET)
With CloudSet you can set required fields in two ways: on update or when solving tickets, zd app you can set fields required only on update.
With CloudSet you can set set fields with more than one condition, with ZD app only one time, for example if you set condition under groups you can't use it again in other places.
With CloudSet you can set conditions regarding ticket status, with ZD app you cannot.
With ClousSet you can set conditions for Users and organization fields, with ZD app you cannot.
Thanks for jumping in, Graham and Mindaugas.
Hi all,
Thank you for the info. So it sounds like for a Professional account that doesn't have immediate need for the Forms or Pathfinders, CloudSet Conditionality is the pretty clear choice.
When you use conditional fields to make a field required for an agent, is the field required to be filled in on ticket creation or does the agent just have to fill in that field in order to solve the ticket?
Hey Candace -
Apologies for the delayed response. This article is a good resource:
Required ticket fields and conditional fields
Basically, marking a ticket field as required within the Conditional Fields app itself ensures that the ticket field will only be required if the field is revealed through field choices. That being said, required conditional fields must be filled out when making any ticket submissions or updates.
Hello,
I have upgraded my Help Center recently, and see that now I am editing from a list of .hbs files instead of how it is shown on these instructions. Is it correct to put the code into the document_head.hbs now? If so, is there a restriction to how many field dependencies that can be generated for the web form? I am trying to get the Conditional Fields to work, but they don't seem to be.
Thanks.
Hello,
According to the thread between Jessie Schutz and Karen: is it possible to create conditionals, where the drop-down menu is displayed after selecting an option from the previous drop-down menu, like in a thee-structure?
What I want to achieve is:
(Available at the start) Question 1: Operating System? Android / Windows / Linux / MacOS
(Answer): Windows
(Then appear new drop-down menu): Windows OS version? Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 10
(Answer): Windows 10
(Then new drop-down menu appears): Windows 10 Build? 10.1 / 10.2 / 10/3
(Answer): 10.2
Etc etc.
Is it possible to achieve this with Conditional Fields application?
Hi Tomasz,
Yes - you can achieve what you have outlined with the Zendesk Conditional Fields, but you would have to create custom field variants for the O/S versions and O/S builds. The user experience would be fine, but from a data perspective it could give you headaches e.g. reporting.
A more sophisticated way is to use what we often call ' dependant value fields' whereby you define a super set of O/S Types and O/S Values. Selecting the O/S Types displays only those applicable values in the drop-down field. In this way you only need three fields, making it much easier to manage and report on.
Take a look at our CloudSET Conditionality App.
This app is available from the Zendesk Paid App Marketplace. It's available on a FREE 30 Day trial.
Graham (CloudSET)
(I just learned that, as of today, Conditional Fields does not support multi-select fields, which is why none of my conditional fields worked for the Agent view after I added a multi-select field to my Conditional Fields - Deleting original request for clarification)
Hey Edward,
It sounds like you found your answer, but just confirming for everyone that unfortunately Multiselect fields aren't available for Conditional Fields or Insights at this time.
A question regarding the end user interface. Has anybody dealt with what the conditional fields do on the request page in the Help Center? It (understandably) shows all fields, but is a bit unsightly. See the screenshot for an example.
For now, I commented out this part of the request.page.hbs:
But maybe someone has solved this and has a suggestion on how to show only the filled in custom fields?
Hi Elizabeth,
I added something like this to the JS to loop through and check these values, thus removing any "empty" (-) values.
Hope this helps!
-Michael
Hello!
I have an issue while designing the request form using conditional fields app. I realized in the Conditional Fields app, I am able to only set up to two levels of conditions or am I going about it wrong? So I set Categories and Sub Categories but I am unable to go further.
What I need is
A user selects what CATEGORY they belong to from a drop down, then they will pick a sub category of what TOPIC their issue belongs to and then based on that we want to show another level of dropdown where they select a particular ISSUE and then another set of 'Text' conditional fields asking users for specific INFO with regards to their issue.
Is there a way to go about this?
- Saranya
Would it be possible to set it up so the CATEGORY and TOPIC as one field, then use the Conditional Fields app to reveal the appropriate INFO fields off of that? So, in the Issue field, the options would look like
CAT1::TOPIC1
CAT1::TOPIC2
CAT2::TOPIC3
CAT2::TOPIC4, etc.
Then in the Conditional Fields app, choose fields for each topic
TOPIC1>Field1, Field2
TOPIC2>Field1, Field3
TOPIC3>Field4, Filed5, etc
Would that work for how you are trying to set up your ticket form?
Hey Eric,
Thanks for your response. even if that would work, we still need another level down.
Say
Product - Postpaid (from list of products)
Issue - Payments (From a list of Issues)
Payment Specific issue - Why am I over charged? (from a list of payment related issues)
Need addl info - Phone number, Device, Date.
So there's 4 levels to go.
Hi Saranya!
You can definitely add additional levels to your dropdown using the method Eric laid out for you. You can find more information about this here.
If you're on the Professional or Enterprise plan level, you'd also have the option of using our Conditional Fields app, which does the same type of thing, but in a different way.
Let us know if you need any more help!
Hey Jessie,
Thank you for the response. I actually tried the method you suggested here that Eric had written an article on but I was not able to do that due to a typo. I realized that later and was able to create the dropdowns and conditional fields that I wanted. :D
Hi Saranya! I'm so glad you got it figured out. :)
Hi, I am using conditional fields on forms and the functionality is working well. However, when agents try to bulk update tickets all the fields being used with in all forms become available making things confusing. How can i configure the instance so that when the form is chosen in the bulk edit option that only the conditional fields relevant to the form are available?
Thanks,
Robbie
Hey Robbie!
My apologies, the Conditional Fields app does not alter the ticket fields that are visible in the bulk edit window, only within the individual ticket interface for Agents. There would not be a specific way that you can configure the instance to overcome this as the bulk edit window will display all ticket fields and does not update dynamically based on a specific form selection within the window.
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