Adding Drop Down Boxes on Requests using Free Fields

You can easily add a drop down box to free fields when you design a request type. When you are on the Request Field Details page, go to the SELECTION area. The first box in that area is the VALUES box and this is where your drop-down choices go. For instance, to let the user indicate how a phone call was made, you could have "Inbound" or "Outbound" as the choices.

All you do is enter each choice separated by a semi-colon. The resulting Drop Down Box will help considerably in gathering cleaner, correct data, rather than allowing the user to enter free text.

Caveat - The first choice in the list is automatically chosen, especially if you make the field a "Required" field. So you might want to make the first choice something like "Choose One" or indicate in the field literal that the user needs to choose the proper response.

How to limit data in Request Types with SQL-like Criteria

To limit the data that is presented in a list box on a request, you can use SQL-like criteria as part of the design for a particular field. This is done via the "Selection" area of the Field Definition screen.

For example:

To limit an account list to customers and prospects use
c.cmp_type in ('C', 'P')

To limit an item list to a given assortment use
items.assortment in (0,1)

To limit to a range of items use
items.itemcode like '51%' (this will pull all items that begin with 51)

To limit to a single item use
items.itemcode like '0009'