In Visibility Rules, “Contains” means a regular expression, not a simple string match

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Little-publicized, to the point that even Support might not be in the loop: the Visibility Rule Contains operator does allow multiple values.

The Contains value is interpreted as a full-fledged regular expression, so use the pipe character | to separate sub-values:

ss

In fact, because of this unexpected/undocumented power, you must anchor an expression to avoid surprises:

^(TX|FL|PA)$ 

Otherwise, it's doing a partial match of the full value against each of your pipe-delimited alternatives. This might not be a problem on your forms right now, but if it becomes a problem, you wouldn't know about it immediately.

For example, if you were using uppercase state names, then

     Contains KANSAS|IDAHO

would match both ARKANSAS and KANSAS, and you should use

     Contains ^(KANSAS|IDAHO)$

instead.

You can also of course do more fancy matches with regexes if you want. And Not Contains is also a regex!

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