Setting up Custom Properties

As a Project Manager or PMO team member, reporting is crucial when it comes to the business process. However, there's often a requirement for more granular/specific data to be captured over and above that which already exists. With Custom properties, you have the ability to create and configure as many of your own additional fields around the data you need to report on, on just about anything in Fluid. Custom properties therefore provide you with an easy way to capture your organisation's taxonomy.

With these custom properties in place, you can apply filters that will extract the data pertaining to all the fields you have.

In this article, we'll show you how easy it is to set these custom properties up.

Step 1. Navigate to Custom Properties in Fluid

• Click on your Avatar (top right of your screen) and navigate to the Administration Console. 

NOTE: Only Application Administrators can set up custom properties. 

• Navigate to the Data Administration section and click on Custom Properties.

IMPORTANT

You can create any custom properties you like! They are an opportunity to 'tag' content in Fluid with any defined fields where you wish to have more granular reporting on your Fluid data. With this flexibility, it is important to remember that regardless of the Data Type you define for your Custom Properties, they are considered ‘free text’ fields that do not carry any logic at all in Fluid! This means that workflow and other logic cannot be applied to these fields.

Step 2. Select the entity you want to add a custom property to

Custom properties can be added to almost any element in Fluid. The image below displays a breakdown of these elements.

• To add a new custom property, select the element you want to add a property to.

Step 3. Add a custom property

• Click on Add Property to open the dialog to create a new custom property. To edit an existing property, click on the pencil icon next the property name.

• The following dialog will appear where you can capture all the detail relating to the custom property that you're adding. Once complete, click Save. (See below image how to complete the form).

NOTE: For Impact and Person custom properties, the dialog will have additional settings. These fields are explained in Step 4 below. 

Data Type

• To start creating a custom property, you first need to select the data type. 

Select the custom property type from the list below. You can find out more about custom property types in the next section of this article. 

NOTE: This field value is mandatory when creating a new custom property.

• Text: Text data type provides a single line of free text.
• Number: Use this data type if you want to restrict the custom property value to numbers.
• Percentage: Use this data type if you want to limit the custom property value to percentages.
• Date: Use this type if the custom property represents a date.
• Person: A Person custom property type allows you to set a user as a value.
• Project: A Project custom property type allows you to set a project as a value.
• Option: Use this type if the value of the custom property should be selected from a dropdown list.
• Multi Option: Use this type if the value of the custom property should be selected from a dropdown list and more than one value can be selected.
  
• Text Area: Select this type if the value should be a free text box.
• YesNo: YesNo custom properties are represented by a switch.
• Hyperlink: Custom properties of type hyperlink, are shown with two fields - the URL field and the text for the link. 
• ValuedOption: The valued option type is similar to the Option type, the only difference being that you can associate a weight value to each option.

Once you have selected the data type for your property, the dialog will refresh to display the Property Value section where you can set the option values or default value for your property. (Please refer to the section below).

Name

• The name of the custom property. The name can only contain letters, numbers, underscores and spaces. This field is mandatory.

Label

• This field is optional. If a value is set, the label value will be used instead of the property name when displaying the property. Labels can be used to give a more user-friendly name to the property if the name represents a technical term for instance. Labels can also use a wider range of characters than names.

Category

• You can group custom properties by category. You can create new categories or select an existing one.

Required

• Set the switch to 'Yes' if a value for this custom property is required.

Reportable

• Set the switch to 'Yes' if the custom property should be included in Excel reports when pulling bulk content - or in the case of a project custom property, if it should be surfaced as a reporting filter in the dashboard reporting.

Admin Locked

• Admin locked custom properties can only be edited by administrators. The administrator role required to be able to edit the property depends on the type of the element the property is added to.
  • Project Administrator role is required in order to be able to edit admin locked custom properties added to a Project, Impact, Schedule, Status Report, Community Plan, Financials, Benefits and Ongoing Costs.
  • User Administrator role is required in order to be able to edit admin locked custom properties added to a Person.
  • Application Administrator role is required in order to be able to edit admin locked custom properties added to an Action, Board, Meeting and Workhub.

Property Dependency

• Sets whether the property is conditional to the value of another custom property. (Please refer to the Conditional Custom Properties article for more information on this option)

Depending on the Data Type value selected, additional fields will be displayed so that you can set up a default value or enter the list of options.

Step 4. Setting up custom property values

When setting up custom properties, depending on which data type is applied, there will be an additional section called Property Value that will display default value fields or option list fields. (Please note that only Person & Project data types do not apply this value/option). 

The following points display which property value is represented and by which data types:

• Text, Date, Hyperlink, Number, Percentage, TextArea and Yes/No are the data types with a default value only.
  
   
• Option, MultiOption and ValuedOption are the data types with an option list and default value. 
  
  
  
• ValuedOptionCalc is the only data type with options list and function.
  
  

Step 5. Additional settings

Impact and Person custom properties have additional fields that are applied to the creation dialog. The following points outline which additional fields are displayed:

• When setting custom properties for Impact, the impact dialog will diaply the impact types that the property applies to. When clicking into that field, the list of impact types will be presented. 

• When setting custom properties for Person, the dialog will display the resource engagement types that can be linked. When clicking into that field, the list of resource engagement types will be presented. 

Where to find the custom properties once they have been created

Rendering of custom properties

Each custom property is rendered differently based on the data type that it is created as. The following points display what data type the custom properties are created as, grouped by which category and how they are rendered when applied. The examples below are based on a demand management/intake process:

• Category - Project Submission Process, with these data types; Project, Person, Hyperlink, Date & Number.
  
  
  
  

Category - Business Drivers, with these data types; TextArea, MultiOption & Option.

• Category - Developments, with these data types; Percentage, YesNo & Text. 
  
  

  
  

  
  
  
• Category - Ranking, with these data types; ValuedOption & ValuedOptionCalc.