Custom Fields and Custom Columns

Custom fields allow site specific content to be added to the Digas database. Custom columns display the content of these custom fields. However, to fully utilize these columns, you will have to create a custom mask.

Naming a Custom Field

A custom field is identified by its unique name. This name must follow these rules:

Must contain exactly one forward slash (/) but not as first or last character.
Only uppercase characters and digits are allowed, but no digit is allowed at the start of the name and immediately after the slash.
Names starting with “DAVID/” or “LOUDNESS/” or “SPEECHTOTEXT/” are reserved.

As a good convention, we suggest to start the name with your company name, followed by the slash, like “MYRADIOSTATION/SPECIAL”.

Defining a Custom Field

Use Digas Admin or DPE Admin to define custom fields. It is recommended to define custom fields in the GLOBAL registry so that all users on all workstations see the same data.

Open the folder DBM|CustomSearch (or create it if it doesn’t exist). Here, create an entry whose name is that of the custom field; do not supply a value for this entry. This will make the custom field appear in the “Columns” page DBM’s settings dialog.

If you want to define a user friendly non-technical for this field, open the new registry entry and provide the user friendly name as the entry’s value.

Following a configuration change, you must restart DBM.

DBM doesn’t allow more than 44 custom fields to be defined at any time. This includes custom fields defined in the GLOBAL registry and those defined in the LOCAL registry.Starting with version 5.12.8325.0, DBM will display an error message and refuse to start if this type of misconfiguration is found. Older versions did not detect this problem correctly and appeared to behave inconsistently with regard to custom fields.

Read the section “Undefining Custom Fields” below for how to fix the issue.

Displaying or Hiding a Custom Column

Custom columns display custom fields in the “entries” and “multitable search” grids like standard columns display standard fields.

Open the Settings dialog and go to the “Columns” page. In the right section (under the heading “Entry view”), the custom field is now included; if a user friendly name was defined, the user friendly name is used, and the technical name otherwise. By setting or removing the check mark to the left of the name, you make the column show or hide in the “ENTRIES” grid and in the “MULTI TABLE SEARCH” grid as well, just like any standard column.

Entering and Editing Data

You can use the inline editing function of the “ENTRIES” grid to enter and edit data in a custom field. Click the entry so select it, wait a moment, then click into the custom column of the selected entry. This produces a text field where you can enter data. If data is already present, you can edit it in the same manner.

Custom fields are not displayed in the metadata mask. If you want to edit custom fields in the mask, you must provide a specially suited “custom mask” as is described elsewhere.

Ordering by Custom Column

You can order the entries of a grid by clicking into the header of the column on which you want to order. This works for all standard columns, and it also works for custom columns. However, custom fields are by default treated as alphanumeric. This means hat ascending order is a → b → c etc., but it also is 1 → 10 → 11 → 2 → 20. If your custom field contains numeric data only, you can change this interpretation of the data to numeric.

Using Digas Admin or DPE Admin, open the entry for the specific field in DBM|CustomSearch, and add “|i” or “|f” to the value. (If no value has been defined, just type “|i” or “|f”). Do not type the quotation marks! The first character is a vertical bar.

The difference between “i” and “f” is that “f” considers decimal places. For example, the field values 2.3 and 2.4 are correctly ordered under “f”, but their order is undefined under “i”.

The new ordering comes into effect after the next restart of DBM.

Undefining Custom Fields

As noted above, DBM doesn’t allow more than 44 custom fields, irrespective of whether they are configured into columns of the DBM main grid. However, if your organization heavily relies on custom columns and has defined several ones in the GLOBAL registry, and you need additional columns which you define in the LOCAL registry, this limit may occasionally be reached.

To fix this problem (starting with DBM version 5.12.8324.0), you can “undefine” a custom field from the GLOBAL registry by overwriting the entry in the LOCAL registry with a value of “-” (a single dash). For example, the global registry may define the custom field “MY/FIELD” by defining the entry GLOBAL | DBM | CustomSearch | MY/FIELD with an empty or non-empty value. To undefine this custom field, use the LOCAL registry, create the entry LOCAL | DBM | CustomSearch | MY/FIELD, and set its value to “-”. This removes the custom field “MY/FIELD” from the configuration at your workplace, and frees up its slot for another custom field which is more important for your daily work.