Custom Fields

A custom field carries a per-face attribute the standard face model has no place for. A store number, a venue code, a network segment, a partner’s own reference — whatever a particular content management system reports and an operator wants to see and report on.

This page is for every employee role in an organization, who see the values on a face and in reports. Only the operator of the installation can add a custom field — ask them if your organization needs one.

What a custom field is here

Three properties define the feature.

It belongs to the integration

Which custom fields exist is decided per integration type — per content management system or exchange — and applies to every organization on the instance using that integration. An organization cannot define a field for itself.

It is read-only in the product

Values are captured while a synchronization run is reading the source.

It is text

Every value is shown as text, exactly as the source delivered it.

How a field is defined

A custom field is set up for the deployment, for a given integration type, by the operator of the installation. Each field has a name shown to people and a rule for pulling the value out of that integration’s catalog.

Adding, renaming or removing a field is a deployment-level change and takes effect on the next synchronization run.

How values arrive

During a synchronization run the platform reads each configured value from the source’s catalog, face by face. For a file import, the configured column is read from each spreadsheet row instead. A face for which the rule finds nothing gets no value.

Values are replaced from the source on every run, like the rest of a face’s source-owned data.

Where values appear

On a face

The detail page lists each field under its human name, below the editable settings. A face with no values shows nothing.

In reports

Where the organization’s integration has custom fields configured, each one becomes an extra column at the right-hand end of the requests report, headed with its human name and filled per row from the face the request was for. See Reports.

Removing a field’s definition hides its values, and restoring the definition brings them back.

Limits

Every configured field becomes a column for every organization on that integration, whether that organization’s source populates it or not.

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