I am working on an enhancement to an existing application and reducing large form to a series of smaller forms. There is a lot of business rules that will mean that some fields will need to be hidden until certain values are set on the form, there are others that will result in fields being shown or hidden as the forms are progressed. Some will be set on forms as a result of other forms having certain status values. 

I know fields can be hidden using the automation rules and tasks also using the hide fieldname; option in deluge script. 

But which has precedence and which is best to use.

It seems you can't use && as well as || (and/or) in the automation rules which means when using the field actions you have to create lots of instances of the same code to get things working which is a pain to debug. 

Any advice welcomed.