Complex Fields

Sometimes, a single field matched with a value isn't enough. If you're capturing information about someone's education, for example, for each "Education" item, you'd want to know more than just the name of the school—you'd probably want to track the degree major, the degree type, and the graduation date (as examples). This is too much information for our more simple custom fields.

This is where Complex Fields come into play. A complex field is actually a field that consists of a number of sub-fields.

In our example above, the "Education" custom field would consist of sub-fields for "school name," "degree major," "degree type," and "graduation date."

How do complex fields work?

A regular custom field is made up of a label and then the value. Think about something like "email address". The label is "email address" and the value is the person's email address. The values are personalized for each profile.

Think of a complex field as a collection of different other fields, called sub-fields. A complex field can have multiple "entries", each with their own values. Think of your work history: at the very least, you have a job title, a company, and a date range for when you worked there. But you probably also have multiple "entries" to that work history (different jobs, different companies, and different time lines). In this example, "Work History" is the complex field's label, and the other three are sub-fields.

Sub-fields

Sub-fields can be any field type with the exception of Document Uploads. A sub-field can be a simple field type, such as a short answer or date, or something more involved, like a dropdown item, checkbox list, or even a long answer field with rich-text entries.

Sub-fields cannot also be regular fields, however. See below for how to create and manage complex and sub-fields.

Sub-fields can be shared among multiple complex fields, however, so if you have a list of schools, for example, and want to have two different complex fields use the same list, you can associate it to both complex fields.

Searching & Filtering Complex Fields

Searching and filtering complex fields is coming soon.

Creating and Managing Complex Fields

Create a complex custom field just as you would with any other custom field. Navigate to Admin -> Custom Fields -> People. There, click on the purple button "+ New Field."

There, select the new type: "Complex Field."

Once you have selected the field type, you'll need to give it a name and (optionally) a description. Remember that like everywhere else, the description is what is used by default on a form (ut can be overridden).

Now you're ready to start associating sub-fields with your complex field. Sub-fields cannot be regular fields, so you'll first need to make sure that you've created sub-fields.

Go to Admin -> Sub-fields

Creating sub-fields works the same as creating a normal field, but you'll only ever be able to assign them to a complex fields.

Now that you have sub-fields, you can associate them to the complex field. This is similar to adding options to a checkbox or dropdown field type, only instead of adding those options, you're adding sub-fields.

Click on "Add New Sub-field" in the Sub-fields section of the complex field, and select the sub-field that you wish to add. You must add at least one.

Once you have your field configured, simply click save at the top of the page and you're all set.