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Custom Form Fields

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Level 2
When creating a custom form for a request queue - is there a way to create a "people picker" field that will allow you to pick a specific person for the request? If so, can you drill it down to pick a person from a specific team? Patricia Cowles
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Level 7
You can do a dropdown menu but you'd have to enter all of the names in manually, are you looking for something tied to users within the system? Richard Carlson Behr Process Corporation

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Level 10
Hi Patricia, A people picker isn't yet available, but was raised some time ago in Idea Share and I believe is "Planned" (no eta yet). In the meantime, as Richard mentioned, you can create your own drop down of certain users manually. If you decide to do so, I'd also suggest you set the "value" of each such person to match their underlying Workfront ID (as opposed to the default behavior of having the value match their name), since, by doing so, you can then use that drop down in other interesting ways, such as filtering based on the currently logged in $$USER.ID (etc.) Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

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Level 2
Yes. I was hoping to have a system generated drop down so if members of the team change. Patricia Cowles

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Level 2
Thank you! That information will be helpful. Patricia Cowles

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Level 7
In terms of assigning tasks in a project this can easily be done by assigning to teams or roles, but in terms of options available to a custom form you're more limited. Richard Carlson Behr Process Corporation

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Level 10
And in answer to the offline question below from Mike, "Yep: exactly". For our Oil & Gas clients we used that very same technique to specify the which Geologist, Exporation Engineer, Surface Land Manager, etc. Regards, Doug Hey Doug - quick question for you. Are you saying that I can create a drop-down field with names as the label and the WF ID as the value, and then I can use a user wildcard to pull that data into reports. For example - field name is "Campaign Sponsor." Label 1 is John Smith and Value 1 is the users WF ID. I create a report where the filter is Campaign Sponsor = $$USER.ID, then when John Smith looked at the report it would pull in every campaign where he is listed as the sponsor? Mike Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

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Level 5
Question though: why go through all that trouble in reporting when you could just filter in a report for the user ID and "is a sponsor"? Seems like the long way around unless I'm missing something. Jazmin Allen-Collins Analog Devices, Inc.

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Level 10
Hi Jazmin, You're correct; As Designed, Workfront has two special User fields on a Project: Owner and Sponsor. For many industries and clients, using one or both of those are sufficient. In other cases, though (to elaborate), Workfront Projects involve mire than just two Users, such as in my Oil & Gas example, where a "lead" from various disciplines (Geology, etc.) is specifically designated. The drop down of people (with a $$USER.ID friendly value for filtering) is an elegant way to model such additional Project to User relationships: it is simple, clear, enforceable, maintainable, results in a Project-level editable result set, and reportable (not only in that it can be used as a Filter, but also a View, Grouping, and Chart, which can be very useful). Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

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Level 2
Hello! We are in the process of adding a new type of custom field that will achieve this very thing (we call it "Typeahead", but it's essentially a people picker). This will allow you to add custom fields that link to a user typeahead and won't require you to add every user that you want into a custom drop down. You will then be able to do things like add the user to a view, or filter or group on that user in a report or list. Here's a link to the idea exchange post: https://experience.workfront.com/s/idea/0870z000000PSCfAAO/detail We don't have an estimated release date yet, but it is currently being worked on. Please follow this idea exchange post for more updates! Jake Turpin Senior Software Engineer Workfront

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Community Advisor
That new field type sounds amazing. What would make it even better would be if we could update current fields to a different field type. So if we could take our current dropdown fields and update them to this new type so we don't have to create a new field, pull all existing forms that have the old field pull whatever info was in that old field to the new field, then remove the old field so that we can create reports without having to CONCAT information from multiple fields. We've had various single line text fields that we've late had to change to paragraph fields and the update of older objects has been a pain.