I would like to have a Notes field in the Who tab of the demogaphics (so that all staff can see without having to select another tab) and I made the change (adding a textarea) in the layout for demographics at the end.
Did not get any error messages but it was not added. Do I understand this incorrectly that I should be able to add fields?
I then tried to repurpose the squad value, made this into a textarea, but shot myself in the food, as I could edit and enter data, but when I exited the Edit screen, the demographics did not show and I got a message ‘demographics not authorizied’ (or something to that effect). Undoing the changes did not fix that - I had to reload the DB from a backup. What might have gone wrong here?
Thanks, Merlin
You can add the fields to Demographics in the Layouts Page. You can achieve this by going to Layouts, Demographics under Who section adding a new field called Notes. For your reference, added the same in the demo instance here. (credentials: admin/pass).
And you have tried to reuse the “Squad” field, it is ‘unused’ by default. If you need to reuse that, change its ‘UOR’ value to required/optional. And The ‘demographics not authorized’ message, should have popped up, becuase of somhow the users access control of which you have logged in has been changed, and not becuase of the Layouts change.
It’s rare to use all 4 User Defined textboxes. When all 4 are used, the text will run together in a big heap, which is a bit untidy.
Another option is to make Unused the 3rd & 4th boxes, have the remaining 2 boxes each occupy a line & increasing the size of the boxes.
Altering the Demographics layout can be unforgiving, so backup beforehand is critical.
When I tried to increase the size to 275, it caused External ID, Sex, License/ID to shift to the far right of the screen; thus creating an awkward layout.
This caused the Layout Editor not to open to Demographics. Only by changing the size back to 63 In layout_options did the Layout Editor become available again.
Thank you so much - found out it was a silly operator error: I had clicked Add New Field, filled it out, scrolled down all the way and said Save - - not noticing that right under the mask to enter the data for the new field there was a ‘Save new field’ button - duh!
Yeah, feature layout makes it so you have to hold your mouth just right to get things to save and update. The layouts stuff and the forms admin are two of the primary offenders. That said, if you make sure to know when to “update” vs “save”, everything does work.