I’ve been using Ayanova for 4 years and have just recently started to get into the nitty gritty cool features and such. I’ve been using custom fields to notate when a customer first came into our shop and how they heard about us. I’d like to be able to filter the client list by custom fields, like I can with the Service Workorders.
After messing with this for a bit I thought I’d add a little…
I just created a report which allows me to see the customer name and when their first service was (a custom field I created and then went back and filled in for all my clients). The report was okay, but limited by the fact that it just gave me a list of clients with their first service dates… I couldn’t sort it or total individual months or anything. I was able to export the list to a csv file and import it into excel, where I could sort and do what I needed to, but it was 2 hours worth of work that could have been avoided if I could filter the clients in Ayanova by custom field. I see custom fields under Service, Quotes and Preventative Maintenance, Parts and Units, but not under Clients. Maybe I’ve got a setting wrong?
Hello
Just wanted to quickly post here again about custom fields and filtering:
Each custom field is defined as a type of field that can accept near infinite amounts of data because we have no idea what the user will be using them for.
Each custom field could be a date field, could be a true/false field, could be a text field, could be a currency field, etc etc.
Whereas for filtering, the field has to be specifically identified as a specific type so that it can be filtered.
For example, the column Bank Service in the Clients grid can be filterd because it has specifically internally been identified as a true/false column, and the filtering tool can filter on this column because it knows to filter by this type.
The underlying database does not support sorting or filtering on a binary field of a custom field type because it needed to be set within the program itself what it is that the custom field data type is set to - not after you have created a custom field, but before hand - which of course is not possible because we don’t know what type of data you are going to set the custom field to.
What we have done, for example in the Unit’s entry screen, is added extra text fields that are fixed as text that are filterable.
Or a suggestion is to use an existing field in the Client’s entry screen that is presently filterable (i.e. the Pager field) and localize it with a new label for whatever you want to use it for. And than you can filter that column in the Client’s grid.
- Joyce