Custom Fields (Basics)

Custom Fields (Basics)

Custom Fields in Redbrick PM

Custom fields in Redbrick PM can be very powerful, they are customisable data capture fields. As soon as you add custom fields to an area, they are immediately available as tokens in document and can also be added to reports. This article will show you the basics of custom fields, and will not go into the realms of Conditional Visibility, requirements or Job Wizard Panels.  

Where you can add Custom Fields

  1. Matter Types (Purchase/Sale etc)
  2. Users
  3. Other Parties
  4. Client (as either;) 
    1. Individual Client Types
    2. Company Client Types
    3. Contacts (Individual or Company Types)
  5. Branch
  6. Your Firm Record (V29 and above)
  7. Documents & Tasks - although these two would be very rarely used. 

Custom Field types

  1.  Address

  1. Date (either on its own or with the time included)

  1. Gender (This will allow you to use His/Her/Their tokens in documents)

  1. Label (These are either just text or can be set up as URLs)

  1. Numeric
    1. Number
    2. Currency
    3. Percentage
    4. Calculated (in the below example, we're simply doing currency X 2) - These cannot be edited by end users

  1. Other Template References (These are rarely used but you can chose which template you want to pull into another template such as letterheads or ToB's)

  1. Party References (Allows you to add a party from the All Parties screen to a specific area)

  1. Selection (A drop down of options defined by you)

  1. Text
    1. Single Line
    2. Multi Line
    3. Email (Currently using this field does not give any specific email functionality so not currently in use)

  1. Yes/No - This is a checkbox (1/0 value)

How to add Custom Fields

Most custom fields are added via the options menu depending on the area you want to add them to. For example if you were adding your Lang Registry Key Number to your "Firm" you would do so by clicking Options>Firm>Custom Fields
Notes
In order to add custom fields to a matter type, you need to have a case of that matter type open. For example, if you have a purchase matter open, this will allow you to click Options>Purchase>Customise> Custom Fields


Adding the type of field you want (Text in this case)

Give it a name and assign it to a panel and group (or create a new panel and/or group more on these later)

Then depending on the field you can select other options down the left. In this case, as its a text field I have various options



As soon as you've saved that, the new field will be available front end in the firm details section (Options> Firm Details)

Panels and Groups

Custom Fields are sorted into Panels and Groups. Panels are shown down the left hand side of the section you've added them to, and groups separate different custom fields. In the below example i have an example Panel and two different Groups 


When setting up custom fields you can either select from custom panels or groups that already exist in your database;


Or you can add new ones by clicking the page icon next to the panel or group dropdowns

When adding a new panel or group you have two text boxes;
  1. Name - this is the database name in your database and therefore must be unique. For example if you're going to add a "Mortgage" section to both sale and purchase its worth calling them something like MortgageSale and MortgagePurchase to they are unique. The system will not let you add duplicates and will say;
  1. Title - Title is what your users will see, these do not have to be unique. So in the above example, if the name is MortgageSale you can simply put the title as Mortgage 
Groups have two extra options "Is Bordered" and "Show Title"
This will simply define how the group looks. For example;
Ticking both will present the group like this
Just ticking Title will keep the title, but remove the border
 
etc. 

Using Custom Field values in Tokens

Custom Fields are some of the easiest tokens to find in the token viewer as they have a clear logic to how they are shown. Start by navigating to the custom field using the drop downs on the Template Editor window. Generally these are order by the first dropdown being where you've added it to (Purchase in this example), then the next dropdown is the panel, the next the group (if its in a group) and finally the name you've given the custom field. 

Once you have selected the custom field you want to use the value from the AS TEXT token will simply pull in whatever is in that custom field, the way it is displayed front end. This is usually how you would want to display it in documents, but you do have some other options.

If we take a Currency field for example, The below table will show you how the various tokens will populate

As Text shows exactly what is in the field, so £200,000.00

Number value will show the number without currency symbols, but you would use this token most often if you are doing conditional logic on it as after you press "IF" you can now use conditions such as "Greater than", or "is Between"


Unformatted numbers will show like this; 200000

Two Hundred Thousand Pounds


If we take a date field such as 15/07/1986

As Text: 15/07/1986

Tuesday, 15th July 1986


Day: 15





Nth Day: 15th
Month: 7
Long: July
Short: Jul

Long: 1986
Short: 86

It is worth exploring the various custom field specific tokens to display the data from your database in the correct format in documents. 

We wont go into all custom fields for now, but will point out that one level deeper on address custom fields is a further breakdown of tokens. After selecting your Address Custom Field, the next dropdown has "Full Address" which then shows many more tokens allow you to breakdown the various parts. 

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