Goal: one feed, but every submitter decides how many times their own schedule repeats.
A subscription of 6 months, 12 months or 24 months. A course of 4 sessions or 10. One feed, three different lengths.
The Recipe #
- Add a Number field to the form — e.g. “How many months?”. Make it required if the schedule depends on it.
- Open the feed at Forms → (your form) → Settings → Recurring Submissions.
- Set End condition to Number from parent form field.
- Choose your field in the Parent Number field dropdown. Entries are labelled with their field IDs.
- Preview and save.
What the Number Means #
The value is the number of additional successful submissions.
The parent entry is not counted. A value of
6produces six child entries.
Only successful submissions count toward it. Failures, conditional skips and skipped missed runs never consume the limit.
Reading the Preview #
In parent-field mode, the feed preview shows the cadence but no submission count — because there is no parent entry yet and therefore no number to read.
Queue previews, for a series that actually exists, use that real parent’s count.
The Child Entry Shows Zero #
On every child entry, the Number field supplying the count is set to 0.
That’s intentional: it prevents a child from starting a schedule of its own. It’s also why a child doesn’t show the number of remaining runs.
Showing the remaining count on children instead is on the roadmap.
If the Field Is Deleted #
The dropdown never silently picks a replacement. A missing selection shows as “Unavailable Number field (#id) — choose another” and you must choose a valid field before saving or previewing in that mode.
Series already running keep the limit recorded in their own schedule snapshot.
Choosing Among the Three End Conditions #
| End condition | Best when | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Number of successful submissions | Every series should run the same number of times | Simplest. Set it once on the feed. |
| End date | Everything should stop on one calendar date | Inclusive, evaluated in the schedule’s timezone. |
| Number from parent form field | Each entry decides for itself | Needs a Number field on the form. |
Only the inputs for the selected condition are shown, and only those are validated — switching between them preserves what you typed in the others.
Good Practice #
- Validate the field on the form. Set a minimum and maximum so nobody submits
0or9999. - Label it in the submitter’s language — “How many monthly reports?” beats “Recurrence count”.
- Watch the first few series in Queue. The Progress column reads
3 / 12against a counted limit, so you can confirm the number was read correctly. - Combine it with an end date if you need a hard backstop — though a feed uses one end condition at a time, so pick the one that must win.
