These fields appear as a short, one-line text box for entering words, letter, or numbers. There is a limit of 200 characters on the amount of text that can be entered.

Paragraph

These fields appear as a multi-line text box for entering longer amounts of text, namely sentences and paragraphs. There is no limit to how much text may be typed or cut-and-pasted.

Encrypted (Credit card or Social security number)

These fields work like short answer fields, except that only the last four characters are visible after the data is entered. The other characters are replaced with x symbols. For example, a social security number will appear like xxx-xx-2716, and a credit card like xxxx xxxx xxxx 5530. The full text can only be seen when an account administrator is editing an individual record. The data is also encrypted in TrackVia's underlying storage system, compliant with PCI DSS and other data protection standards.

Number

These fields require a numeric input. The value entered can be positive or negative, and may include commas or a decimal point. For example, both 12 and -12,302.22 are valid inputs. If TrackVia does not recognize the input as a valid number, it will prompt the user to correct it.

Percentage

These fields also accept numeric inputs like the number type. When displayed, they are formatted using the '%' symbol to indicate that they are percentage values.

Currency

These fields accept numeric input like the number type. When displayed, they are specially formatted using the currency type and format that you specify.

Auto-counter

These fields display an automatically incremented unique number for each record in your table. Although you can specify the starting value, they cannot be changed once assigned.

Date

These fields force the user to enter a day, month, and year. TrackVia validates that the date is legitimate (e.g. February 31 is not a valid date). When entering or editing a date, users will see a shortcut link called today that automatically fills in the current date.

Date and time

These fields are like Date fields but with an additional time component. When entering or editing a date and time field, users will see a shortcut link called now that automatically fills in the current date and time. TrackVia shows date and time values to each user in their own preferred time zone, automatically handling time zone conversions as necessary.

Drop-down

These fields require the user to choose one value from a list. For example, a drop-down list called Gender would have choices of male and female. There is no limit to the number of choices you can have.

When creating a drop-down field, you will have to provide a list of allowed choices, separated by a comma. For example:

small, medium, large, XL

Those choices will produce a drop-down box that looks like this (click the drop-down below!):

Notice that TrackVia automatically puts a blank at the top of the drop-down list. To require users to select a choice other than the blank, check the Required? checkbox for that field on the Edit Table page.

You can also specify a default value for new records by putting one of the choices in square brackets. For example, if you put brackets around medium:

small, [medium], large, XL

then a new record will be pre-selected to the default (click the drop-down below!):

Checkbox

These fields allow you to create a single checkbox or a group of related checkboxes. If you use a group of checkboxes, users can select as many choices as apply. For example, a field called Departments Affected might have choices of Sales, Marketing, Engineering, and Human Resources.

Checkbox fields require the person creating the table to provide a list of allowed choices, separated by commas:

HR, Finance, Marketing, Operations

This will produce a checkbox group that looks like:

To require users to select at least one checkbox, check the Required? box on the Edit Table page.

If you want to create a single checkbox, you must still provide one choice for your field, in addition to the field's name. For example, if your field name is Send newsletter?, you could use a single choice of yes.

Then your form field would look like this:

As with drop-down lists, you can specify default values using square brackets. For example, if your allowed choices are:

Sales, [Marketing], [Engineering], Human Resources

then a new record will have the Marketing and Engineering checkboxes pre-selected.

TrackVia User

These fields appear as a drop-down list containing TrackVia users in your account. Only users who have permission to access a table in the current app will be shown in the drop-down list. For example, suppose a table called Tasks has a TrackVia user field called owner. The user John Doe will only appear as an owner choice if John Doe has permission to access the Tasks table or any other table in the same app as Tasks.

Adding a TrackVia user field to your table can allow you to set up record-level permissions that control which records can be viewed or edited by which users. For example, you could specify that sales reps can only edit customer records that are assigned to them. For more information, see the Table Permissions article.

TrackVia Group

These fields appear as a drop-down list containing any groups that have been created in the Groups table, which is part of the built-in user management app (see the User Management article). Like TrackVia user fields, TrackVia group fields are used to set up record-level permissions, but for many users at once. For more information, see the Table Permissions article.

Link to parent

This field type allows you to link records in one table to records in another table, or to records in the same table where there's a hierarchical relationship among records of the same type (this is called a self-reference, or self-join).

As an example of linking records in two different tables, in your Contacts table, you could create a link-to-parent-record field called Employer that links to the Companies table. Then when you create or edit a contact record, the Employer field would appear as a choice in the dialog box that opens to allow you to search records in the parent table.

As an example of linking records within a single table, you might have an Employees table where you track each employee's name, contact info, date of hire, etc. In this same table you can use a link to parent field to reflect that one employee is the manager (parent) of one or more other employees (child records).

When you set up a link-to-parent-record field, you specify which table you want to link to, and which field in that table you want to choose records by. For example, you might refer to companies by the Company Name field, or by a field that combines both the company name and the stock symbol. For more information, see the Relational Fields article.

Email

When editing a record, these fields will look like short text boxes. When viewing a record, they will appear as a hyperlink that creates an email to the address. TrackVia will only accept entries that appear to be validly-formatted email addresses.

URL

These fields are for storing web addresses such as www.trackvia.com. When viewing a record, these fields will appear as a hyperlink to the entered URL. Entries to these fields are not validated as proper URLs.

Image

These fields allow a user to attach a photo or an image file into a record – for example a bitmap, .jpg, .gif, .png, etc. The image will appear as a thumbnail, which users can click to open or save the full image. There is no file size restriction.

Document

These fields allow a user to attach a file or document into the record – for example, a Word document, .pdf file, spreadsheet or video clip. It will appear as a link that allows the user to open or save it. There is no file size restriction.

Calculated fields

Calculated fields enable you to input formulas that automatically calculate a resulting value in each record. The formula may include values in database fields (ex. Date of Birth) and/or manually input values (ex. 1987-04-12).

Any time a record is updated to change a value used in a calculated field the formula is reapplied and the resulting value is automatically updated.

Formulas can be used to derive the types of values below. Please see our article on calculated fields.

calculated text
calculated number
calculated percentage
calculated currency
calculated date
calculated TrackVia user
calculated TrackVia group
calculated email
calculated URL

What are fields?

Short answer