No applicable aggregate method “Sum” exists at character 22 in Cognito Forms

Question

I have a form that will be used to collect info on conferences attended (one repeating box), and lectures attended (a repeating box within the first repeating box).

I have calculated the number of hours per conference and would like to take that calculation and add it up to give a final tally of all conferences attended. I am using the following:

=ConferenceInformation.Sum(NumberOfHoursForConference)

Which is identical to the method used to calculate the individual conference total, but I just can't get it to work for the final total. What am I doing wrong? I get the error about the aggregate method at character 22 (Sum).

Answer 1

This is a really good use of both Repeating Sections and Calculations in Cognito Forms, and providing this advanced capability was one of our key goals in building the product.

In this case I suspect the error message is misleading and the problem is actually not this calculation but your other calculation. Your Calculation field, NumberOfHoursForConference, is likely configured to be of type Text instead of Number. Because of this, in your secondary calculation, you are seeing an error because there is no way to sum up Text values.

Please change the type of the first Calculation field to Number and see if this resolves the issue. Please comment here either way since this is an educated guess without additional evidence.