Defining Custom Fields

It is possible to enhance the standard Transport Form, Business Task and Project screens with Custom fields. Custom Fields are a popular way for ActiveControl customers to tailor the out-of-the-box product to their individual processes. Custom Fields can be used to drive ‘Skipping’ rules within an ActiveControl workflow, and are also available in most ActiveControl Reports.

Custom Fields are created and edited by ActiveControl Administrators on the [Fields] tab of the Windows GUI configuration screen.

The following custom field types are currently supported:

All custom fields can be marked as optional, mandatory or hidden. Other options are also available for specific custom fields, such as to limit the number of characters of a text field.

*When you create a Dropdown custom field, the order that you see them in the configuration screen is the sequence that you will see them in the Dropdown on the Business Task or Transport Form.

*Section Header field type can be used to create logical groupings of custom fields within the same screen. It simply creates a line across the screen.

!Note that it is not currently possible to select multiple values in a Select List custom field.

Make custom fields read-only after a certain Deployment or Planning status

It is possible to make a custom field (on either a Business Task or Transport Form) become read-only after a certain Deployment or Planning status has been reached. This configuration is done via backend table /BTI/TE_CF_STYLE in the ActiveControl domain controller.

Notes on read-only Custom Fields

(1) Read-only custom fields only works on custom fields. It does not work on standard fields.
(2) You must configure all statuses where you want the field to be read-only. You cannot just enter the first status in the sequence where it should become read-only.
(3) The sequence of statuses is based on what you have defined in [Task Statuses] configuration screen.
(4) User with authorization object Y_TEUSER for field ‘/BTI/TE_AC’ should have the value ‘EDITCUSTFIELD’ to edit the configured field to edit the custom fields at any point, regardless if they are read-only due to the configuration.
(5) This functionality relies on a Deployment Status being defined for every target/location in your workflow. This should be done any for effective Reporting within ActiveControl, but it becomes even more important with this functionality. If you have not set Deployment statuses for some of your path/target/locations – you will see spurious results. Please refer to Defining Task Statuses section of this Administration Guide for more information on how to create these.
(6) This functionality uses the Task Statuses calculations (“Use latest step in sequence” or “Use earliest step in sequence”) defined in Windows GUI Configuration [Other] tab as part of its logic. This means that if you have more than one transport against a Business Task, you may see unexpected results depending on how you are calculating the status. Similarly, you may also see unanticipated results in the event you link a Transport Form to more than one Business Task as part of your process. It should be noted that this activity is not generally recommended by Basis Technologies for most customers.