User Defined Fields

Although TSM provide you with the ability to store a vast amount of information, each company is different and sometimes you might wish that there was an extra field or two to store some specific information not catered for with standard TSM fields.

This might take the form of an additional serial number on a job, a special date field, whether the Maintenance Contract requires additional contract information or whatever you want.

TSM allows you to create User Defined Fields for the following TSM database tables:

• Job Cards
• Contacts
• Employees
• Products
• Maintenance Details
• Maintenance Items
• Purchase Orders
• Contract Job Stages
• Equipment

When a user defined field has been defined, an additional tab called User Fields will appear on the relevant maintenance page.

Select the User Fields Tab and you will see you new User Defined Fields you have set up.

Selecting the User Fields option from the Utilities Menu will display the following maintenance screen.

On the left you will see the TSM Table list which allows you to select the table you want to manage User Defined Fields for.

Selecting the table you want to work with will display a list of all the User Defined Fields setup for that table in the User Fields list on the right side. Information required includes:

This is the unique name for the field. This name must start with “U_” and can be no longer than 10 characters in total. The Field Name should summarise the purpose of the User Defined Field.

This is the description of the field that will appear on screen. Although this caption can be longer than the Field Name, you should try to keep it as short as possible.

• Character - Any combination of letters & Numbers
• Date - Dates only
• Numeric - Numeric field accepting any digits
• Logical - Checkbox
• Memo - Unlimited length text field
• Date Time - Date and Time information

This is the help text that will be displayed when the mouse hovers over the User Defined Field.

The width of the field in characters. Keep this length to a minimum as entering a value that is too large is wasteful of disk space.

For numeric fields only, select the number of decimal places you want. The number of decimals selected automatically increases the field size.

All User Defined fields appear on the User Field Tab starting from the top left corner. Select the order that you want this User Field to appear relative to the others.

Select this if you want the User Field to appear on the screen search and report selection criteria.

Should value have a lookup validation list assigned to it? If this option is ticked, the value must be selected from a lookup list. A new look type will be added to Codes Maintenance which will have the name of the user defined field added.

Note: If 2 different tables have the same user defined field name and both are lookups, they will share a lookup list. This may be useful if one wants both tables to refer to the same lookup list.

Available only for Numeric fields on the Job Card, select this if you want the User Field value to be included in the Job Card total and thus, on the invoice.

This option specifies if the field is compulsory or not.

Sometimes it is convenient to display a calculated value rather than entering a value. For example, you might want to add 2 fields together, display different text depending on a value in another field or even write your own user defined function.

Enter a valid FoxPro expression to be evaluated for this user defined field (Note - Expression is not validated here). Constructing FoxPro expressions are an advanced topic and outside the bounds of this document.

A FoxPro expression that must evaluate to true for this field to be visible to the user.

Note: The field’s label will remain visible.