Conditional Field Inheritance in Jama Connect Interchange™ Excel Functions

Published Date: April 22, 2026
Validated: Yes
Audience: Everyone
Products and Versions Covered: 

• Jama Connect® All versions
• Cloud/CVC
• Self-hosted
• Jama Connect Interchange™
• JCI Module: Excel Functions

Summary

There are use scenarios when we would like to incorporate condition evaluations into our Jama Connect Interchange XLS (JCI XLS) calculations.

These conditions are often based on the content of one or more fields of an item.

The usual approach is to build an equation for a cell that incorporates the condition.

Often, though, such an equation becomes complex, prone to human error, difficult to manage, and difficult to troubleshoot. Also, the logic behind such an equation can be difficult to reveal later.

The diagram below illustrates this use case, where we would have conditions in the form of the contents of two picklist values when using the field inheritance functionality of JCI XLS:

A practical example is from Risk Management when we would like to populate a list for related item's in a field for the Risk Evaluation, only when those related items are mitigations for the Risk Evaluation, further the mitigation is marked as "Currently available" and impacts "Occurrence" based on the contents of picklist values on the related (mitigation) item.

The diagram below illustrates this scenario.

Resolution

We create a multi-sheet spreadsheet to host all the data and calculations we need. 

In this example, the following structure:

them

"Outcome "X"" sheets would hold input and output data.

It is a good practice to use data validation for input data. We can keep those picklist values on the "Validation Data" sheet and reference to from the input data cells.

Content for the "Validation Data" sheet:

The "Conditional evaluation" sheet hosts our conditional logic that tells combinations of the input data that should result in various outcomes.

Each Outcome categhan can be actioned on their corresponding Outcome "X" sheet.

Example for Outcome A:

Please note, columns A, B, C, D, E are input for the Field mapping definition in Jama Connect Interchange:

Condition-based evaluation in column F (Outcome A sheet) based on the conditional evaluation matrix defined in the "Conditional Evaluation" sheet of the same spreadsheet.

In this example, OUTCOME calculated based on the following equations:

=INDEX('Conditional Evaluation'!$C$3:$D$5,MATCH('Outcome A'!E1,'Conditional Evaluation'!$B$3:$B$5,0),MATCH('Outcome A'!D1,'Conditional Evaluation'!$C$2:$D$2,0))

The Actions or Calculations we wish to achieve should be defined in column G or any other cell based on our needs. We should set the output in our field mapping for Jama Connect Interchange to load the result back to the corresponding field of our item.

Additional Resources

• Success Programs
• Success Catalog
• Datasheets
• Request a Solution Offering or Training from the Success Catalog

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