With over 1.2 million fields defined, and millions more placed onto forms, it isn’t feasible to add every possible field into the Quik! Field Definition and maintain them as Standard or Premium fields. With that being said, we know there are times when a customer needs several undefined fields to be static and maintained from version to version on a form.
To solve this situation, Quik! has designed User Defined Fields that are essentially Premium Fields on the fly. These fields are named specifically by the Quik! Forms Team and use a unique formatting that are specific to the form library they are in and are intended to maintain a similar formatting to our Standard Field Names. Our Forms Team will maintain these fields from version to version to ensure that no mapping validations for the customer will ever break.
Breaking down a User Defined Field:
Lets use the example of User.D123.1ownPlacesTraveled
All User defined fields will always start with “User.”
The second part of the field name “D123” represents the DealerID in our system. Every dealer/form library in our system is assigned a Dealer ID. This way we know that this field always belongs specifically in the Dealer that is assigned to that DealerID.
In some cases, we’ll use “F45542” where the “F” represents “Form” and 45542 is the FormID in our system. Similar as above, it lets our team know this field should always only be on FormID 45542 in our system.
The last part of the User Defined Field name will be targeted around what the question of that specific field is for. Using the example of “1ownPlacesTraveled” would be used if the question on the form was asking for the first owner to list out all places traveled.
Potential issue with User Defined Fields:
As you can imagine, if a forms library requires hundreds or even thousands of fields to be mapped using User Defined Fields, it can become quite challenging for our Forms Team to maintain as they aren’t accustomed to every one of those fields as they would for a standard field such as 1own.FullName. This is especially the case when new forms are added several months or even years later to a library and may be worked on by a different Forms Team member.
Our Forms Team in these cases will pull a report showing existing User Defined Fields that have already been used in the library and try to match up fields on the new forms to existing forms in the system. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee 100% accuracy with this type of situation.
The standard procedure in these situations will rely on back and forth conversations with the customer and Quik! to update the new forms to match the existing ones. The higher percentage of fields you’re looking to map, the longer this process will take.