Renaming fields?

Alan French

Is there any way to rename a field on a constituent record? We've just migrated from Raiser's Edge and we used to have the ability to relabel the fields that we'd repurposed so that it was clearer what we were actually storing there (e.g. we don't capture religion so we use that field for something else).

It would be great if we could do the same thing in CRM but I can't find anything about it in the knowledgebase…

Rick Root

@Alan French Generally speaking, no. Not without violating every rule of CRM development

A better solution than repurposing a field is doing a customization. It's more work but less confusing

For example, if you want to store an additional field on a constituent (that has only one value per constituent), just build a constituent extension table where the primary key is a foreign key to the constituent table, put the field in it, then build add/edit form extensions, a query view extension, a view form to display the additional field on the constituent record, and a merge task.

Rick Root

You could also just use an Attribute but.. yuck

Alan French

@Rick Root thanks that's very helpful - I share your sentiment about not wanting to clutter up the place with attributes ?

We've only just migrated to CRM a couple of weeks ago so we're still find our feet but I'll look into the constituent extension table option - if we don't use it for this then it sounds like it might be handy for other stuff in the future!

Warren Sherliker

@Alan French We have been thinking about this for a while - a Chrome/Edge extension would allow this. It would not work for users accessing via a mobile device but we would be happy to help you make this.

I suspect it would have settings like ‘on a constituent view page relabel field X in tile Y to Nationality' or similar. Would have to see how effective it is of course. Should be fairly easy to spin up a test…

Let the team know if you are interested - support at smartthing.org