portatour® Custom Properties are additional properties that are displayed in portatour® Anywhere in addition to the standard properties and that can be customized. They are available for the portatour® entities customer, appointment, and report. Individual fields are grouped together for a better overview in portatour® Anywhere.
To view a list of portatour® custom property groups, go to Administration > Overview and click on Custom properties.
Create new portatour® Custom Property Group
- Click on New. A form for the new group is displayed.
- Under License, click on the magnifying glass to select the portatour® license for which to want you create the group.
- Enter a meaningful group name under Caption. It will be displayed to users in portatour® Anywhere and has to be unique within the selected entity. Choose labels that are as short as possible for clear presentation on mobile devices.
- The Sort Order determines the order in which groups are displayed in portatour® Anywhere. A group with a smaller value is displayed before a group with a larger value.
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Select the Entity to which the new group should apply. The choices are:
- Customer (Account): These are portatour® customers that correspond to accounts in Dynamics 365.
- Customer (Contact): These are portatour® customers that correspond to contacts in Dynamics 365.
- Customer (Lead): These are portatour® customers that correspond to leads in Dynamics 365.
- Appointment: These are portatour® appointments corresponding to appointments in Dynamics 365.
- Report (Task): These are portatour® call reports and reports about missed calls. They correspond to tasks in Dynamics 365.
- Report (Appointment): These are portatour® call reports and reports about missed calls. They correspond to appointments in Dynamics 365.
- Save the group.
Add portatour® Custom Property
- Open the custom property group for which you want to create a custom property. In the lower area of the form, a list of already active portatour® custom property specifications in this group is displayed.
- There, click on New portatour® Custom Property Specification.
A form for the new field is displayed.
- The Sort Order determines the order in which the fields are displayed within the group. A field with a smaller value is displayed before a field with a larger value.
- Under Field name all fields of the selected Dynamics 365 entity whose data type is supported by portatour® are available.
- Under Data type you see the portatour® data type that corresponds to the field. Change it if desired. The data type determines how input and output is handled in portatour® Anywhere.
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Under Mode, you specify whether the field in portatour® Anywhere
- is write-protected (Read Only),
- is writable (Writable),
- is displayed in the window for a new data record (Writable & Show on Create-Form), or
- is mandatory when creating a a new data record (Writable & Show on Create-Form & Required)
- Set Show in customer name to Yes to display the field in brackets appended to the customer name. Use this possibility for important customer information that you want users to see everywhere, e.g. the category.
- Save & Close.
Hints on creating portatour® custom properties
- Some fields are not listed in the selection box. Possible reasons for this are:
- The field cannot be added because of its type. This applies to e.g. associative fields.
- The field has to be created as searchable in Dynamics. Speak to your Dynamics 365 administrator if necessary.
- Some fields cannot be marked as writable. Possible reasons for this are:
- The field is read-only in Dynamics 365 nur lesbar, e.g. creation date.
- The field is not editable in portatour® Anywhere due to the data type.
- Consider adding fields carefully. As the number of configured fields increases, so does the amount of data that has to be sent to the portatour® servers. This affects the synchronization speed.
- Do not select any fields whose meaning overlaps with the portatour® entities, e.g. 'Company name' for accounts.
- The custom fields specified here are adapted depending on the permissions of the individual portatour® users. If a user does not have the permission to change a field in Dynamics 365, then portatour® Anywhere does not allow alterations. If a user does not have the right to view a field, then it is not displayed in portatour® Anywhere.
Link
When using the data type Link, you decide whether the URL should be hidden or not: If you decide to hide the URL, you cannot see the actual address but an 'open' link. Click on Open URL to open it in a separate browser window. Use this option e.g. to display URLs that are very long for users in portatour® Anywhere.
If it is a CRM link, you can also edit the link template here. This controls the form in which the link is displayed in portatour® Anywhere. The default template creates links that open the target data record in the Dynamics standard form. Customize the template to open a special Dynamics form, for example. The placeholders {etn} and {id} are replaced by the logical name of the target entity and the ID of the target data record.
Selection and multi-selection
If you do not want to allow free text input, but rather specify concrete selection options for filling a field, then use fields of the type OptionSet for selection or MultiSelect OptionSet for multiple selection.
The options available for selection are stored directly in the field in Dynamics 365 (Settings > Customizations > Customize the System); ask your Dynamics 365 administrator if necessary.
External files
To enable the upload of external files, e.g. photos, Excel files or PDF documents, select fields of the data type External file or External files. The uploaded files are not saved on the portatour® servers. Rather, upon creation of the custom field, you define on which server and in which directory the files shall be saved. The server must support the WebDAV protocol and be accessible via internet. The data transfer is SSL coded via https. Before the data transfer, portatour® authenticates itself on the server by using the user name and password you set.
If you do not want to run your own WebDAV server, there are a large number of suppliers on the internet who provide cloud storage with WebDAV access and satisfy the requirements of both individual users and big companies. Normally, the setup can be finished within a few minutes. Search for 'cloud storage' or 'online storage' and ensure the desired supplier supports WebDAV.
Some technical hints for the upload of files:
- The External file data type allows the upload of exactly one file in this field. The Dynamics field must be a field of the Single line of text data type and have a minimum length of 255 characters.
- The External files data type allows multiple files to be uploaded in this field. The Dynamics field must be a field of the Multiple lines of text data type and have a minimum length of 255 characters.
- The maximum size per uploaded file is 10 MB.
- You cannot upload files for call reports in the offline mode. Any files for reports must be added later in the online mode.
- The files are automatically saved to sub-directories on the server – one directory per user and day. The file names are created automatically and contain the customer name and a unique ID.
- If you export call reports as Excel or CSV and files have been included and uploaded for these call reports, then you find the respective directory and file names in the exported file. The same applies to the export of customers and appointments.
- iPhones and iPads only allow the upload of photos – no other files. This is not a restriction of portatour® but of the device itself.
- The memory space on the WebDAV server is your responsibility. portatour® can no longer find files which you delete, move or re-name on the server.