Customizer tips
The following are tips or useful information that help you create user-defined or custom tabs.
Troubleshooting user-defined or custom tabs
To make sure the user-defined or custom tabs are created properly, these pre-requisites must be in place.
- Make sure all users exit iMIS before creating or modifying a tab.
- You must have an authorization level of Customers level 8 to create a tab, (see To create custom tabs) so either log on as a user with that authorization level or log on as MANAGER before creating a tab.
- Back up your data before creating or modifying a tab.
- Make sure the field or tab does not have the same name as any table/field in iMIS or any SQL reserved word (see SQL reserved words).
Unique table and field names
When creating a user-defined table, you must use unique tables and fields. You cannot use an iMIS table name, an iMIS field name, or a SQL reserved word.
Note: To ensure unique naming, prefix acronyms to tables and fields you create. For example, organization ABC could define tables in the form ABC<TableName>; so, a table for the Discovery Conference could be ABC_DiscoveryConference, and its Name field could be DC_NAME.
Limits for fields and window tabs
There are no technical limitations on the number of fields for each user-defined tab; however, if a tab contains more than 50 fields, the tab becomes cluttered. This design may prevent users from viewing some fields.
To see a list of the user-defined tabs displays in the Customer Setup – Additional Windows window, from Customers, select Set up module > General, and click Additional Windows. This menu can display up to 20 tabs. If your tabs exceed this amount, consider consolidating the data so fewer tabs are needed.
The maximum length for a character field in a tab is 8,000 characters. If you define a field with over 8,000 characters, the data type becomes a Text data type.
User-defined fields in iMIS special pricing
If you have a user-defined field that contains a year and would like to use it in special pricing, you can use the datepart function. In the following example, the field is Name_Custom.MEMBER_YEAR. It is a character field with a length of four. Add the field to the Name_All view, and you can use this calculation in special pricing:
If Name_All.MEMBER_YEAR >= datepart (year,Today(*))
Then 100
Else 200
Endif
The datepart function in this example takes the year from the current date, Today(*). The IF statement compares the current year to Name_All.MEMBER_YEAR, resulting in customers being charged 100 if the MEMBER_YEAR is greater than or equal to the current year, or 200 if the MEMBER_YEAR is less than the current year.