User Defined Fields Part 2 Freezerworks 2015

Introduction – 00:00

Welcome to part two of our discussion on User Defined Fields.  Today we are going to talk about a couple of advanced field properties, Index Field, Default Values, and Color Formatting.  

Index Field – 00:13

We have a Patients Dropdown List field called Hospital, since we will want to search with this field often, we should turn on Index field.  This activates two radio buttons, if your field is going to be unique or will simply have a variety of entries select Many Distinct Values, but since our field is a dropdown with only three values to choose from, we should select Many Duplicate Values.  Indexing your fields make searching much faster, but try to limit the number of index fields to save space on your data file.  

Default Values – 00:50

We want to set up our Hospital field to default to certain values based on another field’s value, so let's check on Default Values and then click the Define Default Settings button that appears on the right.  You can enter a static default value with no dependencies using the Entered Default Value field and you can also add the name of the user working in Freezerworks to the default value.  During data entry anytime you enter something that changes another field’s default value, a confirmation appears.  If you'd rather not see this message, and save yourself a click in the process, check on Suppress Confirmation.  Now, let's select the field whose value will determine our Hospital value.  It should probably be Doctor, don't you think?  Next, we should click Add to List to begin adding Conditional Default Values.  First, we enter a Doctor named, let's go with Samson, and then we select the Hospital that will be defaulted to whenever Doctor Samson is entered on a Sample or Patient Entry Screen.  The operators on the right allow you to select a different relationship for the Dependent and Default Values.  We will want to use Exact Match for all our Doctor-Hospital relationships, but Range and the “>=” and “<=” work great for Numeric, Date, and Time based values.  You can always highlight a default value entry and either modify or delete it, even after saving the field.  

Color Formatting – 02:33

How about we add some color to our Hospital values to make our data that much easier to read on entry forms.  On the Color page, you can add a Default Color, as well as any amount of Conditional Colors based upon the values in another field.  This bottom section works much like Default Values.  First, select the field whose values the color of this field will be based on.  We are going to just select the same field, Hospital, in order to differentiate the hospitals by color.  Then, let's click Add a List and select a Hospital from the dropdown.  Again, you can choose from the other operators here to set up a more complex condition for the color setting.  Click Save when you're done, then highlight the new list item and click Set Background.  Choose your background color using the Color Picker.  Now, let's click Set Text Color and choose the color for text.  The example text column shows you what each values color setting looks like, you may decide after seeing this to make your text bold.  

Field Properties in action – 03:48

Now, let's take a look at our Hospital field in action on a Samples Entry Form.  Let's open a sample, and then select a hospital from the dropdown.  Notice the blue background that appears, let's select a different one and watch the color change to yellow.  Now, let's enter Samson into the Doctor field to trigger our Default Value.  The confirmation message will appear, click OK.  Highline becomes the new hospital and our color once again changes to match the new value.  

Conclusion – 04:26

That concludes our discussion today.  Thank you for watching, and until next time.