how to substitute for a field that is part of a field group

Hi Support, 

how can i use CB substitution where a field is part of a field group?  when i call the field as a substitution, e.g. [cb:userdata field="FIELD_NAME" /] it seems to show up empty if that field is part of a field group, or if it is a multi-select field.  

thanks for any advice, 
Mark

It's a bit complicated, but it is doable. The names of fields inside of their field groups will still be the same as the original fields, but you have to take into account the row number. Example as follows.

Field Group: cb_fldgrp
Field: cb_city
Row: 1
Substitution: [cb_fldgrp_0_cb_city]

The problem is row indexes are not always sequential. So this may not be very accurate. It's very difficult pulling information out of a field group and I really don't recommend trying to do so as it goes against the point of using them. If you need a dedicated value for external referencing consistently you really shouldn't use a field group.

Thanks for clarifying Kyle.  I think calling the row number as you've shown will be problematic in my use case e.g. if a user deletes a group entry in preference for another more recent group entry then that old row number disappears, so calling a fixed row number will return an empty value.  The use cases i would have for calling a field associated with a group field (and prob similar for other users) would be for: 

- retrieving the *most recent* entry for the field_group 
- displaying all the entries for that field (e.g. user x works in the following towns: x, y, z) 

I guess I would need to use a separate code field to do this using sql or php? 

If you only need the last entry or first entry there are pseudo indexes for those. Example as follows.

[cb_fldgrp_first_cb_city]
[cb_fldgrp_last_cb_city]

Beyond that it is not really reliably possible to do this with substitutions. The more ideal approach would be to use a CB Code Field and write the necessary PHP to process the field groups JSON into whatever format you need. I doubt substitutions alone will ever be able to satisfy your requirements as there just isn't a reliable enough way to retrieve that data using unknown indexes.