Custom Fields

Introduction

The legal industry is broad and covers many different subject areas. Similarily, every law practice is different and every practice gathers data in different ways.

The Customize Form function in HoudiniESQ allows you to customize Calendar Events, Matter and Contact forms to best suit your practice's needs.

Organization Manager

To customize forms, go to your Organization Manager. You can access your Organization Manager, click the orange arrow at the left hand side of your Houdini ESQ desktop and then click Organization.

Once the Organization Manager window has opened, click on the Form Fields tab. This will take you to the Customize Forms menu.

Customizing a Form

For our example, we will customize a Meeting form which is a Calendar Event. Above is a screenshot of the original form, with no customization. We will add a field that keeps track of what conference room a scheduled meeting will be held in.

Choosing a Task/Category

When you first open the Customize Forms menu, you must choose your Record Type. Your choices are: Event, Matter and Contact. Once you have chosen your Record Type, you can choose your Record Sub-Type.

In this example, we have chosen Event as our Record Type and Meeting as our Record Sub-Type.

Creating a New Field

Once your Record Type and Sub-Type have been chosen, a new table will appear. Any existing customizations will be listed in the table. This form currently has no customization so it is blank.

To create a new custom field, click the New Field button. This will open a new form which you will use to customize your new field.

Label - This is the name of your custom field.
Entry Type - The entry type is the type of data in the field. There are different types:
Entry Field - Creates a text field
Memo - Creates a larger text box
Date - Date field (ie. 01/01/10)
Check - Creates a check list of options
Dropdown - Creates a dropdown list of options
Radio - Creates a radio button list of options
Required - Checking this box makes this field required. The form will not save without a value in this custom field.
Mask - This field will mask entries
Validator - This optional field checks that the information added in the form is a valid format. Validating options include credit card, currency, email, text length, number, phone, social security number or zip code.
Options - If you have chosen an entry type that creates a list of options, you can enter those options here, divided by commas.
EXAMPLE

For our example of adding a Conference Room field to a Meeting event form, we have made the following changes:

Label - Our label is “Conference Room”
Entry Type - The entry type is a dropdown
Options - We have entered “Room A, Room B, Room C, Room D” as our options
as our options

Saving the Custom Field

Once you have made the changes to the form, click the Save button at the bottom right hand corner of the Customize Form menu. Once you have clicked Save, the new custom field you have created will show on the table.

Viewing Your Custom Form

Once you have saved your custom fields, you can open the form you just customized.

In this example, the new drop-down field “Conference Room” is now visible on our Meeting Event form.