Custom fields

Most businesses track two or three things OrderDen doesn't: a wholesale account number, a scent family, the gate code for a site, the reference from the customer's own system. Put them in a notes box and you can't filter or export them. A custom field keeps each one as its own value.

Add them in Company Settings → Custom fields, which owners and admins can open.

Adding one

Each kind of record has its own list of fields: clients, items (which materials share), orders, quotes, invoices, vendors, purchases, projects and expenses. For each field you set:

• Label: what people see. Change it whenever you like.
• Key: what the value is stored under, and the name the API uses. It starts with a letter, uses letters, numbers and underscores, is saved in lower case and is at most 40 characters. Change it to fix a typo and every record's value moves to the new key. Anything reading the old one, such as an integration or a spreadsheet built on the CSV column, has to use the new key afterwards.
• Type: text, number, date, yes/no, link, choose one or choose several. The two choice types need their choices listed.
• Required from now on: checked whenever a record's custom fields are saved. It doesn't go back and flag records saved before.
• Print it in the document header: for quotes, orders and invoices, beside Issued and Client PO.
• Show it on the form: untick it to hide a field without deleting it. The field is marked Hidden, its values stay, and it's no longer required or exported.
• Offer it as a list column: saved with the field, but the lists in the app don't show custom field columns.

The arrow buttons set the order fields appear in.

Filling them in

Fields appear in a Custom fields section on the client, item, material, vendor, purchase, project and expense pages. Owners and admins always see the section, with a Manage link to the settings. Everyone else sees it once it has fields in it.

Quotes, orders and invoices have no custom fields section in the app. Their fields, including the ones printed in the header, are set through the API.

A date field takes a date, a number field takes a number and says so if it doesn't get one, and a choice field takes only its own choices, in any case, stored as you spelled them in the settings.

Filtering by them

The API's list endpoints take them as cf.<key>:

A filter naming a field you've deleted is ignored. The lists in the app don't filter by custom fields.

Import and export

The API's CSV export (?format=csv with no columns) includes every custom field as its own column, headed with its label. The Export CSV button in the app exports the columns on screen, so it leaves them out.

The Clients and Items imports offer custom fields in the mapping step, so a sheet headed "Wholesale account no." maps itself. Blank cells are skipped instead of clearing a value, because "not in this file" isn't the same as "clear it". The other imports ignore custom fields.

Deleting a field

Deleting a field stops its values showing, exporting and filtering right away. The values stay on their records until that record's custom fields are saved again, so if you delete one by mistake, add it back with the same key and the values come back.

In the API

All 9 kinds of record accept and return customFields, an object keyed by your keys, and their list endpoints take the cf.<key> filters. A partial write merges (sending one field never clears the others), and sending an empty value clears one. The definitions are at /api/v1/custom-fields. See the API reference.