The Fields You Will Meet

A record is made of fields, and every field is a small tool of its own: a text box, a date picker, a list of colleagues to choose from, a place to drop a file. This chapter is the catalog. Look up the kind of field in front of you, find out how to fill it in, what it does that you would not expect, and what it looks like when you are only reading it.

What This Is

A reference, not a tutorial. It describes each kind of field your application can be built from, grouped into families: text, numbers, dates and times, yes/no, choices, links to other records, files, and a few special ones.

For each kind you get three things: what it looks like, how to put a value in, and how the same value appears read-only — on a record detail screen, in a table row, or on a card.

How a form as a whole behaves — required fields, validation, tabs, saving, fields that appear and disappear — belongs to Creating And Editing Records. This chapter is only about the individual controls.

Why It Matters

Several of these controls behave differently from the equivalent in a spreadsheet or a web form you know. A date box is your browser's, not the application's. A checklist saves the moment you tick it, with no Save button. A picker for related records searches only the name of the thing you are looking for, not its description.

And your administrator decides which kind of field each piece of information gets. If a field is fighting you — you cannot type cents into a price, you cannot find a customer by their reference number — knowing the kind of field it is turns a complaint into a precise request. The last section of this chapter phrases those requests for you.

Things That Are True Of Every Field

Before the catalog, a handful of rules that apply everywhere.

Your application names the fields. Every label, help line and placeholder is set per application and can be translated. The names used as headings below are the built-in names for the kinds of field. Your screen will say "Delivery date", not "Date". If you need to describe a field to your administrator, the kind name here is the word they will recognize.

Required fields are not marked. There is no asterisk and no color. You find out a field is required when you press Save and it turns red with a message under it. See Creating And Editing Records.

Help text sits under the control, in small gray letters, when your administrator wrote any.

Empty fields are usually hidden on the record detail screen. A field with no value simply does not appear. If a field you expect is missing from a record but present on the edit form, the usual reason is that it is empty — not that it has been removed.

A field can be locked. A field that is not editable is shown but does not accept typing. This is set per field, and can depend on your role or even on the record itself, so a colleague may be able to edit something you cannot. See Why Your Screen Differs.

Rich controls arrive a moment late. Search boxes, the month picker, color pickers, the rich-text editor and the file uploader are all loaded on demand. On a slow connection you may briefly see a plain text box or a plain dropdown that then turns into the real control. Anything you typed in that first instant can be lost, so give the form a second to settle before you start.

What You See In Place Of A Missing Value

You see	What it means
Nothing at all	The field is empty and your application hides empty fields on the detail screen
`(none)`	The empty entry in a dropdown, and the read-only display of an empty multiple-choice field
`(empty)`	Used for a yes/no field that has never been set to either Yes or No
`#42 (deleted)`	This field points at a record that no longer exists. The number is all that is left of it

Your administrator can replace any of these with wording of their own for a particular field, so a blank price might read "not quoted" in one application and nothing at all in another.

If you click a link to a related record and get a message that the record is not available, that is a different thing: either it was deleted, or your role is not allowed to see it. See When Something Goes Wrong.

Text Fields

Text

A single-line box. The everyday field for names, references, short descriptions.

Your administrator can attach a typing pattern to it, in which case the box formats what you type as you go — for example forcing a phone extension or an invoice number into a fixed shape. They can also put a small gray chip before or after the box, which is how a unit or a currency symbol is usually shown next to a plain number or code.

Rules an administrator may set: a minimum and maximum number of characters, and a required pattern. Breaking the pattern gives the message "Invalid format".

Read-only, it is plain text on one line.

Long Text

A multi-line box with a drag handle in the corner. No toolbar, no formatting, no character counter. Line breaks you type are kept and shown as line breaks when the record is displayed.

Use it for notes and descriptions where formatting does not matter.

Rich Text

A full editor with a toolbar — the field for anything that will be read as a document: a proposal body, a customer-facing note, a knowledge-base article.

The editor is about the height of a short page and has a single toolbar row that slides if the window is narrow. Left to right it offers undo and redo, a paragraph-style dropdown, a font-size box, bold, italic and strikethrough, text and highlight color, clear formatting, a link button, image, media and attach-file buttons, alignment, bulleted and numbered lists, outdent and indent, block quote and an attachment-style block, subscript and superscript, a source-code view, a preview, full screen, and help.

Pasting from Word or a web page. Paste normally with Ctrl+V / Cmd+V. Formatting comes along; the editor cleans up what it cannot represent. Your administrator can restrict which formatting is allowed in a particular field, and anything outside that list is removed silently when you save — so if bold survives but a table disappears, that restriction is why. Right-clicking inside the editor offers only paste and link; use the toolbar or the normal keyboard shortcuts for everything else.

Links. Select some text, press the link button, paste the address. The editor also turns a typed web address into a link on its own once you type a space after it.

Images and files. Drag an image file into the editor, or use the image button; it uploads as you watch and appears in place, shrunk and re-encoded first so a 6 MB photo does not become a 6 MB attachment. Copying an image out of another application and pasting it straight into the editor does not work — save it as a file and drag it in instead. The upload button next to the image button attaches any other kind of file as a paperclip block with a download link.

@-mentions. Type @ and a picker appears. It works in two steps: first you choose the kind of record you mean (Customer, Project, Ticket…), then you choose the record itself. What lands in the text is a blue chip that links to that record. Expect about a second of delay before the list of suggestions appears — that pause is built in, so keep typing rather than pressing @ again.

Example. You are writing the internal note on a support ticket: "Reproduced on the staging system for @" — you pick Customer, then start typing "Halvor" and pick "Halvorsen Logistics". The note now carries a chip that anyone reading the ticket can click to jump straight to that customer.

Mentions in the discussion panel under a record behave the same way but also notify people; see Comments And Mentions.

Read-only, rich text is rendered as formatted text inside the record.

Markdown

A plain multi-line box in which you type Markdown by hand: **bold**, # Heading, - bullet.

There is no toolbar, no preview and no highlighting. You see the formatted result only after you save, on the record detail screen. If you are not comfortable writing Markdown from memory, ask for the field to be changed to Rich Text.

Text With HTML Formatting

A code editor with line numbers, bracket matching and Ctrl+Space completion, for typing HTML by hand. It is a specialist field; if you have been given one, you have been given instructions with it. Note that the record detail screen shows the HTML source, not the rendered result.

E-mail Address

A single-line box that accepts one address and refuses anything that is not shaped like one — the message is "Please enter a valid email address." Read-only, it becomes a clickable mail link that opens your mail program.

Telephone Number

Two controls side by side: a country dropdown showing a flag, the country name and its dial code, and the number box next to it. The country names come from your browser, so they appear in the language your browser is set to.

The dropdown starts on the Czech dial code (+420) unless the field already holds a number, or has a default value, that names another country.
Type a number with a leading + and at least four digits and the country dropdown jumps to match.
As you type, anything that is not a digit, +, hyphen or space is dropped.
When you leave the box the number is tidied up. If you typed a + number whose country code the field does not recognize, the box is emptied without a word. If a number keeps vanishing, drop the + and the country code and pick the country from the dropdown instead.
Pressing Enter in the number box submits the form.

Read-only, it becomes a clickable dial link.

Password Field

A masked box that is always shown empty, even when a password is already set. Leave it empty and the existing password is kept; type in it and the password is replaced.

Under the box is your application's password rule, in words. If what you type does not satisfy it you get "Password does not comply with security rules."

The field appears on forms only — never on the record detail screen — and reads as ***** anywhere a value would otherwise be shown. Your own sign-in password is changed elsewhere; see Your Profile And Account.

Link (External)

A plain box for a web address. You do not have to type https:// — the link built from what you typed adds it for you if you leave it off. Read-only, the value becomes a link with a small outward arrow that opens in a new tab.

Number Fields

Integer And Large Integer

A number box for whole numbers. Most browsers add small up and down arrows and offer a numeric keypad on a phone. "Large Integer" is the same field for counts too big for the ordinary one; you will not notice a difference while typing.

A decimal point is rejected with "Please enter a valid integer." Your administrator can set a minimum, a maximum and a step.

Decimal Number And Floating Point Number

A plain box for numbers with a fractional part.

What to type. Either a period or a comma works as the decimal separator — 1234.56 and 1234,56 are both accepted — and spaces are ignored, so 1 234,56 is fine too. Whatever you type is stored the same way, and values are displayed back with a period, regardless of the separator you used. Do not type a thousands separator as a period or comma; use a space or nothing.

Decimal Number keeps two decimal places. Anything beyond the second is rounded away silently on save: enter 19.999 and the record holds twenty. If you need more precision, that is a "Floating point number" field and worth asking for.

Floating point number keeps many more places but is subject to the small rounding artifacts every computer has with fractions, so a total may occasionally show a long trail of digits.

Example. Your quantity field on a delivery line is a Decimal Number. Typing 2,5 and typing 2.5 both give two and a half; the record displays 2.5. Typing 2,555 gives 2.56.

Money

Despite the name, this field as shipped takes whole numbers only and carries no currency of its own. Typing 1250.50 gives "Please enter a valid integer."

Applications work around this by holding whole units (whole euros, whole crowns), often with the currency shown as a small gray chip beside the box. Check existing records to see which convention yours uses; if you genuinely need decimals there, ask for the field to be changed to Decimal Number.

Star Rating

A row of clickable stars with a small ✕ button at the end that clears the rating. There is no text box — the value is whatever the stars show.

Click star n to set the rating to n.
Click the star that is already selected to reset the rating to zero.
Hovering previews what a click would do.
The ✕ clears it.

Keyboard. Tab to the star row, then: → or ↑ adds one, ← or ↓ removes one, Home clears, End sets five, the digits 0 to 5 set the value directly, Backspace or Delete clears, and Space or Enter confirms (setting 1 if there was nothing).

Ratings run from 0 to 5. Your administrator can change the symbol drawn, or have it show plain numbers instead of stars, and can have it draw more than five symbols — but the stored value still stops at five, so clicking a sixth symbol records five. If that is what you are seeing, tell your administrator.

Read-only, the rating shows as filled and empty symbols, with the numeric value and the maximum in the tooltip.

Date And Time Fields

Two general points first.

The written format is fixed. Dates are displayed as day, month, year separated by dots and spaces — 3. 6. 2026 — everywhere in the application, whatever language it is running in. The day and month carry no leading zero; the year is always written in full.

Time zones. Times are stored centrally and shown to you in your own time zone, which is set on your user record. A colleague in another country sees the same appointment at their own wall-clock time. If times look consistently wrong by a fixed number of hours, your time zone is wrong or misspelled — see Your Profile And Account.

Date

Your browser's own date box. That matters more than it sounds: the order of the day, month and year segments, the calendar pop-up, and the keyboard shortcuts inside it are your browser's and your computer's regional settings, not the application's.

In practice: click the small calendar icon at the right edge to open the picker, or click into the box and type. Typing works segment by segment — type the day and focus jumps to the month, then the year, and ↑ / ↓ step whichever segment you are on. Delete or Backspace clears the box. If your administrator set an earliest or latest allowed date, the picker refuses anything outside it.

A date is a calendar date only. It is never shifted between time zones, so a contract signed on the 3rd is the 3rd for everybody.

Date And Time

Your browser's combined date-and-time box, to the minute. Everything above applies, plus a time portion you fill in the same way. Seconds are not part of it.

Read-only it shows as, for example, 3. 6. 2026 at 14:30. Whether the time is 24-hour or has am/pm is set for your application as a whole, and can be set differently for an individual field.

Example. A dispatcher in Prague sets a collection time of 3. 6. 2026 at 09:00. A colleague whose user record says London sees the same record as 3. 6. 2026 at 08:00. Both are correct; it is one moment shown twice.

Year And Month

A box showing a month and year — "June 2026" — that opens a small month picker when you click it: a grid of months with arrows to change year. You cannot pick a day; the value is the whole month. Useful for accounting periods and reporting months.

Year

A number box holding a four-digit year. Your administrator normally sets an allowed range, for example 1900 to 2100, and a year outside it is refused with "Minimum value is …" or "Maximum value is …".

Time

Your browser's time box: a clock time on its own, with no date. Depending on how the field is set up it may show seconds as well as hours and minutes, and may step in fixed increments such as quarter hours.

One oddity: when you filter a list on a Time field, the filter offers numeric wording — "Less than", "Greater than", "Interval" — rather than date wording. It works; it just reads strangely. See Filtering Your Data.

Time Range

A duration, not a moment. Use it for "how long did this take", not "when".

It renders as three small boxes in a row — hours, minutes, seconds — with the label carrying a (HH:mm:ss) reminder. Only digits are accepted. Minutes and seconds cap at 59 and are padded to two digits when you leave the box; hours are unlimited, so a 30-hour total is fine. Pasting a whole value such as 1:30:00 into any of the three boxes splits it across all three.

Read-only it shows as 01:30:00.

Example. A service engineer logs "Time on site" as 2 hours 45 minutes. The record shows 02:45:00, and a monthly report can add those durations together.

Yes / No

Checkbox

A single tick box with the field name as its label.

Read-only it shows as Yes or No. A checkbox that has never been touched is not the same as "No": it displays as empty (or (empty)), unless your application has been set to treat "never touched" as No.

If your administrator has enabled quick editing for the field, you can also right-click the record in a table and set Yes or No straight from the menu, with a tick showing the current value. That applies immediately, with no confirmation and no undo. See Selecting Records And Bulk Actions.

When filtering, a checkbox offers "Not set", "Set to anything", "Yes", "No", "Is" and "Is not" — "Not set" is how you find the records nobody has answered yet.

Choice Fields

These offer a fixed list of options. The list is either written out by your administrator or drawn from a small reference list of records elsewhere in the application, in which case the options appear in the order somebody arranged them in, not alphabetically.

Options can also be filtered per record, so the same field can offer different options on two different records. That is intentional when it happens.

Single Choice (Radio)

A list of radio buttons — all options visible at once. Best for two to five options. Clicking one deselects the other. There is no way to clear a radio group back to nothing once you have chosen; if you need "none", ask for that to be an option in the list.

Single Choice (Select)

A dropdown. By default it is the enhanced kind: click it and a search box appears at the top of the list, and typing narrows the visible options. The whole list is already loaded, so filtering is instant.

Two things to know:

An empty first entry appears only if your administrator switched it on, and a required dropdown never gets one. Without it, the dropdown has no "nothing" option.
A dropdown with no empty entry shows its first option, and stores it if you never touch it. A required dropdown behaves this way every time. Nobody warns you, and pressing Save stores that first option. On a form where a dropdown matters, look at it before saving rather than after.

Example. A new support ticket form has a Priority dropdown whose first option is "Low". If you never touch it, the ticket is created as Low. Set it deliberately.

Multiple Choice

The same box, but you can pick several. Each choice becomes a small chip inside the box with an ✕ to remove it. The dropdown stays open after each pick so you can select several in a row; click outside or press Esc to close it. At the top of the list there is a Select all / Unselect all pair.

Order is kept. The chips sit in the order you picked them, and you can drag a chip to a different position in the box. Where the values are printed together — in a table cell, on a card — that is the order they appear in.

Read-only, multiple values are joined by whatever separator your application uses — a line break, a comma or a vertical bar — and show as (none) when nothing is chosen.

Country

A dropdown pre-filled with every country. It stores the country's code but shows the country name in English. An empty entry is offered only if the field is optional.

Checklists

A checklist field behaves differently on the form and on the record.

On the form it is a single dropdown, and what you are choosing is which checklist applies to this record — "Onboarding checklist", "Pre-flight checks", "Move-in inspection".

On the record detail screen it becomes the checklist itself: a stack of rows, each with a tick box. Items can be colored by whoever designed the checklist; a ticked item with no color of its own turns green. An item that has a longer description is a link — click it to read the detail in a pop-up window.

Three things matter:

Ticking saves immediately. There is no Save button for a checklist and no confirmation. The tick is stored the moment you click it, and there is no undo — untick it to reverse it.
Changing which checklist applies clears all the ticks. Re-choosing the same checklist is safe and keeps them.
If the tick boxes are missing entirely, your role is not allowed to check items on this record. The checklist then reads as a colored list.

Example. A property manager opens a move-in inspection, sets the checklist to "Standard inspection", and works down the list on a tablet ticking items in the flat. Nothing needs saving; the record is up to date as they go. Switching to "Furnished inspection" halfway through would wipe the ticks already made.

Fields That Link To Other Records

This family is the heart of most applications: the customer on an order, the project on a task, the assignee on a ticket. The value is another record, not text.

The Standard Picker

By default a link field is a box you click to open a dropdown with a search field at the top.

Start typing and the list narrows. There is no minimum number of characters; the list is there as soon as you open the box, and the first letter already filters it.
Typing waits a quarter of a second after you stop before it asks the server, so results appear just behind your typing. "Searching…" shows while it waits.
The search looks only at the name of the target record — the field that acts as its title — and it matches anywhere inside that name, not just the start. It does not search codes, descriptions, e-mail addresses or any other field, and it is not fuzzy: a typo finds nothing.
Results come 20 at a time. Scroll to the bottom of the list and the next 20 load automatically ("Loading more results…"). Occasionally you will see that message produce nothing more — that is the end of the list, not an error.
Options can be grouped, with gray headings inside the list.
If nothing matches you get "No results found".
A single-value field has a (none) entry at the top of the list; choosing it clears the field.

Example. On a new order, the Customer field is a link field. You type halv, and after a moment the list shows "Halvorsen Logistics" and "Halvorsen Retail AS". Typing the customer number 44120 finds nothing, because the picker only searches names — search by name, or ask your administrator to include the number in what the picker shows.

A stale list. Results can be a moment out of date, so a record a colleague created seconds ago may not appear until you reload the page.

Picking Several Records

When a link field accepts more than one record it behaves like the Multiple Choice field above: chips inside the box, an ✕ per chip, Select all / Unselect all at the top of the list, the list stays open between picks, and chips can be dragged into a different order — which is worth doing when the order is meaningful, such as a list of authors or a route of stops.

Some link fields carry a small blue Create link with a plus sign, just under the box. Click it and the form for the other kind of record opens in a pop-up window on top of the one you are filling in. Fill it in, save it, and the new record is closed and dropped into the field you started from.

The link appears only if your administrator switched it on for that field and your role is allowed to create that kind of record — so its absence may be either answer, not a bug. It never appears on a public page.

Example. Halfway through a new order you find the customer does not exist yet. Rather than abandon the order, click Create under the Customer field, fill in the four fields the customer form asks for, save, and you are back on the order with the new customer selected. Nothing you had already typed on the order is lost.

If the field you fill in this way is one that other fields depend on, the form behind may refresh itself when the value lands. See Creating And Editing Records.

Clearing A Value

Single value: open the dropdown and choose the (none) entry at the top. A required field also offers that entry, but refuses to save it — set the field to something else instead.
Several values: click the ✕ on the chip you want gone, or use the ✕ at the right edge of the box to remove them all ("Remove all items").
Gallery picker: the ✕ button on the preview strip clears the whole field at once.

The Gallery Picker

Your administrator can switch a link field to a visual picker for cases where you choose by looking — products, room types, document templates, image assets.

You see a preview strip showing the current selection as small cards with a thumbnail (or an icon if the record has no picture), and — unless the field is required — an ✕ to clear it. Clicking the strip — or pressing Enter or Space when it is focused — opens the gallery window:

A search box at the top, focused for you, with the placeholder "Search items...". Typing searches on the server, a quarter-second behind your typing.
A Selected items section, which appears once something is selected.
An Available items grid of cards below it. Scroll to the bottom of the grid and the next page loads automatically.
In the footer: Save, and a Cancel link.

How to use it:

Click a card in Available items to select it; it moves up into Selected items.
Click a card in Selected items to take it out again; it returns to the grid.
When several records are allowed, Shift-click a second card to select the whole run between it and the one you clicked before.
When only one record is allowed, clicking a different card replaces the selection; clicking the selected card again clears it, if the field allows being empty.
Nothing is applied until you press Save. Closing with Cancel, the ✕ or Esc throws the changes away.
If the field is locked, the window opens as a read-only display of the current selection, with no search box and no Save.

Example. A catering manager builds a menu. The Dishes field opens a gallery of dishes with photos; they search "salad", click three cards, Shift-click a run of four desserts, and press Save. Back on the menu the preview strip shows all seven with thumbnails.

The Checkbox-List Picker

The other alternative your administrator can choose for a multiple-value link field is a list of tick boxes instead of a dropdown.

If the options are grouped, you get an accordion: one collapsible section per group, each with a tick box in its header that selects the whole group at once. The header box ticks itself when you have ticked every item inside.
If the options are flat, you get a search box, a Select All / Unselect All button, and — when there are more than ten options — a Show all (N items) link that expands the list, with Show less to collapse it again.
With a search term typed in, Select All applies only to the items still visible, which is the quick way to tick a whole category.

These four button labels stay in English even when the rest of the application is in another language.

Fields That Point At People

A field that points at a person works like any other link field, with two additions: people are listed as Name (email) so that two Jan Nováks can be told apart, and the list is grouped by the group each person belongs to, with the ungrouped ones under "no group".

If the field is required, holds one person, and is empty, you are pre-selected — provided you are one of the people it is allowed to offer. Convenient for "Reported by", worth checking on "Assigned to".

How Link Fields Look Read-Only

The name of the linked record, usually as a link. Clicking it opens that record in a side pop-up window without losing where you were — see Pop-up Windows. If the linked kind of record has no detail screen you are meant to open, the name is plain text instead. Several values are joined by your application's separator.

If the linked record has a color of its own, the value is drawn as a colored chip in tables and on cards rather than as plain text.

A link to a record that has since been deleted shows as #42 (deleted).

Some fields are not something you fill in at all: they show the records that point at this one — "how many open tickets does this customer have", "which invoices belong to this order".

They come in two shapes. Most often the field shows a count. Configured differently, it shows the list itself: the names of the matching records, each a link, joined by the usual separator. Either way there is nothing to edit; the value is worked out fresh every time the record is displayed.

A record detail screen may also carry whole embedded lists of related records with their own filters and buttons — see Record Detail Screens.

Files And Images

A file field appears in one of two shapes: a blue button reading Choose file, Choose files, Choose image or Choose images that opens a drag-and-drop panel, or — less commonly — a plain browser file box with an Erase? tick box next to the current file.

Files already attached are listed above the button, each with a red trash icon; once more than one file is attached, each row also has a grip handle for dragging them into order.

Two things to carry with you:

Deleting a file from a record happens immediately, with no confirmation and no undo.
Reordering files saves immediately too.

Read-only, files are download links that open in a new tab. Images show as thumbnails, and clicking a thumbnail opens it full size in an overlay you close with Esc or by clicking outside.

Everything else — dragging and dropping, progress, size limits, what to do when an upload silently fails, and the file repository — is in Uploading Files And Images.

Small Pickers

Color

A text box you click to open a color picker: a shade square, a hue strip and a hexadecimal value you can also type or paste directly (#1B7F5A).

Read-only, the value shows as a small square of that color followed by the code itself.

Icon

A text box with a preview of the current icon at its left edge and an ✕ at its right. Click the preview to open the icon browser, search it by name, and pick an icon. The ✕ clears the field. Read-only, only the icon itself is shown.

Map

A single text box in which you type an address or a place name — there is no map on the form, no autocomplete and no list of suggestions to pick from.

On the record detail screen the value is drawn as an embedded map with a pin on the place, roughly neighborhood zoom.

Two consequences worth knowing:

Nothing checks the address. A typo produces a map of the wrong place with no warning. After saving, look at the map and confirm the pin is where you meant.
The map is loaded from an outside mapping service each time the record is shown. On a network that blocks it, the map area stays blank; the address text is still there and still correct. This is also worth knowing if the addresses you handle are sensitive.

Example. A field-service record has a Site field of this kind. The coordinator types Nádražní 62, Ostrava. On the record, an embedded map shows the pin. Typing Nadrazni 620 instead would put the pin on a different building with no complaint from the application.

Structured And Repeating Values

Structured Data

A field that holds a small table of keys and values rather than one value. You edit it in a built-in editor rather than by typing raw data.

You get a Root type dropdown (object, array, string, number, boolean, null) and a nested table: Property and Value columns for a set of named entries, or a single Items column for a list. Below it sits a New key box with an add button, and each row has a drag handle for reordering and a delete button. Two small icon buttons at the top right copy the whole value and let you paste a replacement into a box; bad input is refused with "Pasted value is not valid JSON."

If your administrator has defined a required shape for the field and what you enter does not match, you get a warning message describing the problem — and the record still saves, but without that field's new value. Read the message; do not assume the save was complete.

Read-only, the same table is shown without controls.

Repeating Blocks

Some records need "the same few fields, several times over": order lines, passengers, monthly figures. That is a repeating block — a group of fields with a circled + under it that adds another copy, and a circled × on each copy that removes it after asking "Delete item?". The last remaining copy cannot be removed.

If whoever designed the block gave each copy a drag handle, copies can also be dragged into a different order. The whole block is saved with the record like any other field.

Read-Only And Calculated Values

Not everything on a form is something you type.

Evaluated expression. A box you cannot type in, showing a value worked out from other fields — a line total, a reference built from a code and a year, a full name assembled from parts. It updates when the record is saved, never when you type.

Callback fields. Fields whose content is produced by something your administrator wrote — a lookup, a status summary. There is nothing to edit. Be aware that if the calculation behind one fails, the field renders blank, which is indistinguishable from "no value". A field that is unexpectedly and permanently empty on every record is worth reporting.

Canvas renderer. A field position filled by a custom-designed block — a chart, a small summary panel, a button strip — rather than a value.

Section heading. Not a field at all: a heading used to break a long form into visual sections. It holds nothing and cannot be edited.

Any field can be calculated. Your administrator can attach a calculation to an ordinary field, in which case whatever you type into it is overwritten on save. If a value keeps reverting after you change it, that is why.

How Fields Look In A List

Most fields print the same read-only value in a table cell or on a card that they show on the record detail screen, with a few adjustments:

A related record whose own record carries a color is drawn as a colored chip rather than plain text.
Fields your administrator marked as tag-like are drawn as chips side by side on cards instead of one per line.
Images appear as small thumbnails, capped in height so rows stay readable.
Multiple values are joined by the application's separator — a line break, a comma or a vertical bar. Where it is a line break, a cell holding four values is four lines tall.
Some fields can be expanded into several columns. One stored value then produces several read-only columns of its own. Those extra columns cannot be sorted, filtered or reordered.

See Tables and Cards, Lists And File Lists.

Worked Example

A sales coordinator raises a new order.

Order number (Evaluated expression) is filled in for them and cannot be typed into.
Customer (link field) is empty. They type dagm, wait a beat, and pick "Dagmar Interiors s.r.o." from the list.
Delivery address (Map) — they paste the street address from an e-mail. No map yet; it will appear on the record once saved.
Delivery date (Date) — they click the calendar icon and pick the 14th. The box reads 14. 8. 2026.
Delivery window (Time range) — 2 hours 0 minutes, stored as 02:00:00.
Priority (Single choice) — the dropdown already shows "Standard", its first option. They open it, search "urg", and set "Urgent" deliberately.
Items (repeating block) — + three times, one line per product, dragged into picking order.
Discount % (Decimal number) — they type 12,5; the record will show 12.5.
Prepaid (Checkbox) — left untouched, so the record shows the empty placeholder rather than "No". They tick it, because "not answered" would be ambiguous to the warehouse.
Handover photos (Image, multiple) — nothing yet; the driver adds them later from a phone.
Internal note (Rich text) — a sentence, with @ used to mention the account manager so the note links to their record.
Save.

On the record detail screen afterwards: the address shows as a map with a pin, the customer as a clickable link, the internal note as formatted text, the discount as 12.5, and the empty photo field does not appear at all until the first photo is added.

Tips And Gotchas

Look at every dropdown before you save a new record. A required dropdown, or one with a single option, silently pre-selects a value.
Ticking a checklist item and dragging files into order are instant and permanent. They do not wait for Save, and there is no undo.
Deleting a file from a record is instant and permanent too.
A relation picker searches names only. If you routinely search by a code or an e-mail address, that is a configuration request, not a technique to master.
A field that changes another field's options costs a round trip: the form is re-sent and redrawn. Values typed into a field that the redraw hides are erased.
Empty is not always visible. A missing field on a record detail screen usually means "no value", not "removed".
Blank calculated fields can mean "failed", not "empty". Report a field that is blank on every record.
Maps, the month picker, the file uploader and the icon set all load from the public internet. On a locked-down network the symptom is a plain box where a rich control should be, a blank map, or missing icons, with nothing on screen explaining why. See When Something Goes Wrong.
Some messages stay in English whatever language your application runs in — the built-in validation messages ("Please enter a valid integer."), the checkbox-list buttons, and the gallery's "Available items" heading among them.

What To Ask Your Administrator For

Field behavior is configuration. You cannot change any of it, but each of these is a small, specific request:

"The Customer picker only finds people by name. Can it search the customer number too, or show the number next to the name?"
"Amount rejects 1250.50. Can it be changed from Money to a Decimal Number so it takes decimals?"
"Quantity is losing my third decimal place. Can it keep more precision?"
"Can Priority get an empty first entry, so a new ticket does not default to the first option?"
"Can the Prepaid checkbox show as No when nobody has answered it?"
"Delivery date should not accept dates in the past — can you set a minimum?"
"The Products field would be much easier as a gallery with pictures."
"I cannot tick the items on the inspection checklist. Can my role get the right to check and uncheck?"
"Region is empty on every record, on every screen. I think its calculation is failing."
"Can the Notes field be Rich Text instead of Markdown? I cannot see what I am writing."

For your administrator: the implementer documentation on Properties describes every setting behind this chapter.