Build a form with dropdown lists, step by step

A school-visit form needs to know exactly which district a visit happened in. We want two dropdowns: pick a state first, and the district dropdown then only shows districts that belong to that state — instead of a single unfiltered list of all 766 districts in the country to scroll through.

This takes four stages: create the parent list, create the child list, upload data into both, and bind the two form questions to them. Each is shown below with the real screen you will see.

1. 1Look for Custom Drop Down in the sidebar and click New list.
2. 2Name it “States”. Leave Parent list set to Nothing — this is a top-level list, since States is the top of this chain and has no parent of its own.
3. 3Click Create list.

1. 1Click New list again. Name it “Districts”.
2. 2This time, set Parent list to States — the list you just created. This is the one setting that turns Districts into a dependent dropdown instead of a plain, independent one.
3. 3Click Create list.

Start with the parent, States, since Districts will need to refer to it. Open the States list, click Upload CSV, and upload a simple two-column file — a label and a value for each state.

Now open Districts and upload its file. Because Districts cascades from States, a parent valuecolumn is required and is recognized automatically from the file's headers. Each row must name the state it belongs to, using the state's value (e.g. AP) — not its label (“Andhra Pradesh”).

Open your form in the builder. Add a Select an optionquestion labelled “State”, open its settings, and switch from Type your own options to Choose from a list, then pick States.

Add a second Select an optionquestion below it labelled “District”, and point it at the Districts list the same way. Because Districts cascades from States, a new field appears: Narrow down by an earlier answer. Set it to the State question you just added.

Preview the form. The State dropdown shows all four states. Pick “Andhra Pradesh”, and the District dropdown — previously showing “Choose State first” — now lists only Visakhapatnam and Krishna. Change State to “Nagaland”, and District reloads to show only Kohima, clearing whatever was previously selected. Nobody filling out this form can end up submitting a district that does not belong to the state they picked.

From here, the same pattern extends naturally: add a Block list cascading from Districts, then a School list cascading from Block, for a four-level chain — or add a lookup rule that auto-fills a UDISE code the moment a school is picked. Both are covered in Cascading and lookups.