A field property defines how the field acts, what it is called, how
it's information is formatted and displayed, etc.
Permissions are required to work on Custom Objects and
Fields.
|
Field Label |
The name of the field on the page that the user will see. |
|
Field Name |
The name of the field in the PerfectMind application. It
can be the same as the Field Label, or different if you need a more descriptive
name for setting page layouts, reports, etc. |
|
Description |
A short description of the field, it's purpose, it's data,
etc. to help others to understand it's use. |
|
Required Field |
Information must be entered into this field before the new
record or changes can be saved. Required
fields can have default values. |
|
Default value |
The text, number, value, date, or selection from a list
that will automatically be filled in when a new record is created. For
a Checkbox field the default value is either Checked or Unchecked. Fields
marked as Unique should not have a default value, since this can result
in data being duplicated (not unique) if the default data is not changed.
Image and
Attachment fields have a choice of default images that can be used, as
well as leaving it empty. |
|
Display Format |
You can customize how the number will appear to the user,
and use it to identify an object. See
below for How to Format an Auto
Number. |
|
Starting Number |
For an Auto Number field, this is where PerfectMind will begin assigning
Id numbers. For
example, if the starting number is 5000 the first record entered will
have an Id number of 5000 and the next record entered will have the number
5001, and so on. |
|
Related To |
In a Master-Detail or Lookup Relationship field, the name
of the other object that is being linked to. |
|
Relationship Name |
A descriptive name of the relationship, such as Customer_Invoice,
or a name that helps identify the objects and the purpose in linking them. |
|
Display Field |
What field from the other linked object will shown. |
|
Length (text and text area fields) |
How many characters can be used to enter information. For
Text and Text Area fields this is a maximum of 255 characters, for Text
Area (Long) fields this is 32000 characters. |
|
Length (number, currency,
percent fields) |
This is how big or how many places the number can have.
For example
if the length is 8, up to 8 characters can be used to represent the number
(0 - 99999999). |
|
Decimal Places (number, currency,
percent fields) |
Specify how many decimal places will be used. This
can effect calculations depending on how numbers are rounded off. For
example, using the number 1.235, a decimal place value of 3 will show
it as 1.235, but a decimal place value of 2 will show it as 1.24
The decimal value counts against the total length of the
field. For
example, if the field has a length of 8, and a decimal value of 2, it
can display a maximum of 6 characters before the decimal place and up
to 2 characters after it. |
|
Date |
Shows day, month, and/or year depending on the formatting.
You can
set your date settings for the PerfectMind application and for your locations in
the PerfectMind setup. |
|
Date/Time |
Shows day, month, year, hours, minutes, and/or seconds depending
on the formatting. You
can set your date settings for the PerfectMind application and for your locations
in the PerfectMind setup. |
|
External Id |
The external Id is a unique record identifier that comes
from information outside of PerfectMind. It
could be an old customer Id, vendor invoice Id, etc. This
allows you to reference the external data easily. |
|
Unique |
If this is checked each value entered must be unique, and
the same value can not be used in this field in any other records for
this object type. For
example, no two invoices can have the same invoice number. |
|
Sort Values Alphabetically |
The list will be sorted alphabetically starting with the
first character. |
|
Use First Value as Default Value |
The first item in the list will appear in the field as the
default value for the user. They
can select another value if they want. |
|
Visible Lines (Pick List Multi Select and Text Area Long) |
How many lines should displayed to the user. This
can be between 2 and 10 lines. Scroll
bars are added to the field if the number of lines of information in the
field is more than the Visible Lines property. |
You can use text, numbers, and date information in creating and formatting
an Auto-Number field.
Note that when using numbers and dates, the { and } characters are used
to tell PerfectMind that what is between the curly brackets is a number or a date.
0 - Acts as a placeholder for any number.
MM, DD, YY, YYYY - Act as placeholders for the month, day, year (2 digit),
and year (4 digit).
You can change the Field or Data type on a field after it has been created.
This should
be done with great caution if
at all, as you can lose or change data that has already been entered.
If there
are already objects with data (e.g. customer records, invoices, etc.),
this can cause problems, as the data types can be very specific as to
what kind of information they hold. PerfectMind
will warn you if changing data types will cause invalid data to be entered,
or data to be lost. Once
deleted or shorted, data can not
be recovered.
Data can be permanently lost when changing between incompatible data
types. Also,
formulas may not work correctly. For
example, changing Text to Image will cause data to be lost, since text
cannot be converted to be represented as an image. A
Number could be changed to Text, but it might affect a Formula field that
is doing calculations, and the formula would fail if a user typed "two"
instead of the number 2. If
you change from a Text Area (Long) to a Text Area, then you could lose
data, since the first field can hold 32000 characters, and the second
only 255.