Fields (Custom & Standard)

Above we can see a variety of fields. For example we can see:

• Client ID – which is a field that cannot be edited. When you save a new Client the id is created by adding 1 to the last Client ID that was saved before it.
• Client Type – this is an example of a field with a dropdown selector
• First Name – this is a field with a text box, you can write straight into this field the first time, then it must be edited from the Additional Details tab thereafter. 
• Date Of Birth – is a date field, clicking on it results in the date selector pop-up
• Date of Birth Type – is a multiple choice selector
• Flagged – is a simple tick box field.

So from the above we can see a variety of styles of fields. But it is also important to understand that in CLASS there are two types of fields:

Standard Fields and Custom Fields and these two types operate quite differently.  

Standard fields are the standard issue options that all centres begin with. They start with obvious things like Client First Name and Last Name, and date of Birth etc, and on Services they include Service Type, and Legal Problem Type and many more. There are also a lot of Standard fields baked into CLASS as these were required by the National Legal Data Standards which are critical for the majority of centres funded under the National Partnership Agreement on Legal Assistance Services. These include Gender, Country of Birth, Financial Disadvantage indicator etc. Standard fields can be managed further by Field Mapping (see below). 

Custom Fields by contrast to the above, are fields that have been custom created by the centre. These may have been created in the old database CLSIS and brought over to CLASS, or they may have been created recently in CLASS itself. Custom fields can be added to many elements in CLASS such as to Clients, or all Services, or Services with particular Legal Problem Types, to Workers, or even your Centre Profile. Custom fields can be searchable, and also added to reports. There is also a great variety of Custom field styles, such as those listed above including drop downs, text boxes, tick boxes, dates etc, so it is very important to consider which style of custom field your centre needs before creating it. 

Field Options – Another important element of Fields are Field Options. These are the selectable options that are built into a field. Not all Fields have options. For example a First Name field does not have any selectable options, because the user would create the data directly by typing the name into the field. A Client Type by contrast has three options which we can see in the screenshot below: