Best Practice for Fields Used by SysAdmins?

[CalvinFold]

Looking for best practices/methods for dealing with these two scenarios: How do you hold onto deprecate fields that you still need around for reporting without cluttering-up custom forms? In other words, I understand I can't remove a deprecated field because it would vanish from older jobs and lose data. What do you do with "utility" fields? For example, calculated value fields that are unimportant to the user, but I need there to create a value used on a report somewhere or to set a metadata flag. I thought you could create a section and hide it to all but SysAdmins, but I discovered this hides the value of that field from user reports. :-( So right now I'm stuck with having a "Systems Administration" section at the bottom of every custom form that needs it, and it has to be visible...and I'm not liking that idea. It should be noted that our custom forms are not set-up in isolation: a given input brief (request/issue) is made of 4-5 custom form modules we can swap in and out and modify separately from one another, for example: A requester might fill out a series of custom forms in a single go: Project Level Metadata [boilerplate to all input briefs] Accounting Information [boilerplate to all input briefs] Instructions [no fields, just general form instructions] Request Brief [specific to the request chosen] Extra Sub-Brief [boilerplate across multiple Briefs, but not on ALL of them] This library lets us build whatever combos we need without re-inventing the wheel for big chunks of it. But it also means whatever solution proposed above will show-up multiple times from the user's perspective if it's per-form. :-( We're only a couple weeks into deployment, but these sorts of things are already important and I have a chance to set best practices now before things get crazy... Kevin Quosig

[KirstenHe]

Hey Kevin, To your first point - have you tried creating one custom form that exists just to hold deactivated fields instead of making a deactivated section on each custom form? There's some information about managing custom forms here , but it honestly looks like a lot of work. I don't really have a great way to manage this myself, so I'll be interested if anyone else has a response. Kirsten Heikkinen Trek Bicycle Corporation

[BrianMa2]

Hi Kevin (and Kristen), Have you tried toggling "Is Active" on the Form Settings tab (when a field is selected)? This disables it on the form, but does nothing to your data. Brian Brian C. Mauger Bloomberg L.P.

[Heather_Kulbacki]

I believe when you un-check "Is Active" on the Form Settings tab, it deactivates the whole form, not just a particular field on the form. Kevin, You mentioned creating a section visible to only system admins, once you've done that are your user reports run with the access level of a system admin? That should allow anyone who runs the report to see what you would see, as a system admin.

[MaddyMa]

Hi Kevin! Unfortunately there's not a great way that we've found to decommission a specific custom field within a form without deactivating the entire form. What we've done to circumvent this is below: Copy the custom form (keeping the same object level) Remove the fields that are no longer needed Deactivate the original form Attach the new form to all relevant project templates (or wherever else you used the original one). Create a filter in your Custom Forms section to only show active forms. This way, the old versions won't clutter your list. This keeps all of our data, and creates a seamless transition for the team as well. As far as the "utility fields," we've created a custom form that contains all of this information that is not visible to anyone but our group (in this case Marketing). We attach this form to the bottom of EVERYTHING, and then we always have reliable and consistent data. You just have to teach your team that this portion of the custom forms (or rather, this specific custom form) is only visible to us and isn't visible to the end users. Hopefully this helps! :) Maddy Martin

[ImreMa]

Hi Kevin, You can create a new section at the bottom of the form, set that up as "Admin only" for visibility and put the not needed fields into that bucket. I usually name those sections as "Reporting only". It may bother visually us (Sys Admins), but not the rest of the community. I hope it helps, Imi ImreMagyar VODAFONE Group