The Trip field

When a survey is worked on planned trips (a vessel catch log, a multi-day circuit of stations), each record should say which trip it belongs to. The Trip field type does that: it shows a picker of your organization’s planned trips, right in the form, and the record links to the one chosen.

A field, not a setting

The trip is an answer in the form, exactly like the Station field. That one design choice settles three things:

Not every survey needs a trip. You add the Trip field only to survey types that are worked on trips. A survey type without the field has nothing to do with trips: no picker, no prompt, nothing to skip.
A trip-based record cannot lose its trip. Mark the field required and a record physically cannot be saved without one. The answer is visible in the form, so nobody discovers after a season that their records were never linked.
It works the same everywhere. Web entry, rapid entry, offline collection in the browser, the desktop app, and mobile all show the same picker, fed from your planned trips (synced to devices, so it works offline).

Add a Trip field

Open the survey type in the builder.
From the field palette, add Trip.
Give it a label, mark it required if a record must never save without a trip, and save.

The picker reads from your organization’s trips automatically. The Vessel Trip (Catch Log) starter survey type already includes a Trip field (and a Station field) at the top.

How a crew uses it

Anywhere: open the form and pick the trip from the list, like any other answer.
On a device, the shortcut: open the synced trip under Plan and tap Collect on this trip. Every new record starts with the Trip field pre-filled (a banner names the active trip, with a Leave trip action), and Save and add another keeps it, so a whole session stays on the trip.

What it powers

Live station filtering. With a trip chosen, a station picker in the same form narrows to that trip’s stations, numbered in the planned visiting order ((1), (2), and so on). Change the trip and the stations re-filter.
The trip progress board. The trip’s page shows each planned station as collected (with its record count) or pending, computed from the records linked to the trip. See Trip planning.
A Trip column on the records page, so a trip’s records are easy to see together.