Designing Screens › How to Create Screens › Add a Field › Define a Field

Define a Field

You can only define a field after you have added the field, using Add Field. You then select the attribute, entity or group view to use as a field.

Use the Field Definition panel to define the following fields:

• Import view to be mapped to the export view.
• Prompt that accompanies the field. You can select an existing prompt, add a new prompt, or display the field without a prompt.
• Field characteristics-displayed or hidden.
• In an online system, you may need to save information between procedure step executions. To do this, you can hide the field that contains the information. This lets the data pass between the export view of the proceeding execution and the import view of the next execution without appearing on the screen. Any field identified as a hidden field must be associated with an import and an export data view; otherwise, the data cannot be passed between the executions of the procedure step.
• Length of the display and, for numeric fields, the number of decimal points.
• The length of the display is the number of character positions required to display the field on the screen. The display length may differ from the number of characters in the value because of the additional characters in the edit pattern. For example, the attribute Date Ordered for an entity named Customer contains a four-digit year, a two-digit month, and a two-digit day (attribute length of eight). For it to appear using the edit pattern YYYY-MM-DD, the display length is 10.
• The Screen Handler can accept only those numeric fields that have a length of 18 characters.
• Edit pattern to be used for field display. While it is preferable to keep edit patterns consistent across a business system, you may need to locally change an edit pattern on selected screens.
• The edit pattern is the way the information in a field is formatted. Edit patterns are used to make values in views more readable when they appear on a screen.
• Help identifier for the field. The identifier is associated with the text for the help system. The help identifier records information needed by the help system of the installation to locate help text for the screen.
• Field video properties.
• Error message video properties.

When setting field and error display properties, you can use system defaults or you can override the system defaults with local properties. You have the same options when setting properties locally as when setting system defaults.

For attributes within a group, you can define the fields individually or you can define all attributes in the group in one sequence. If you select a group view, CA Gen guides you through the definition of each field until all fields have been defined, including fields in lower level groups.