Everything you need to know about ImageNow Custom Properties

Today we are going to try to dig into the details of custom properties. What is a custom property? A custom property is a property field that is populated with data relating to a folder or a document. Custom properties allow you to store additional data beyond the standard index fields. You can make custom properties available for use by assigning them to documents or folders.

Now we’ll talk a little bit about the custom property types. You can define a custom property using one of the following data types: composite, date, flag, list, number, string, or user. The formatting settings let you control the data entry and display appearance of the custom property for viewing by your end users. Some of the data types require default values and others’ default values are optional.

Let’s actually go through each one, starting with composite. Composite custom property allows the user to enter multiple values for a single property. An example of this would be payment information. This shown here on the screen holds a number of different things, including check amount, check date, check number. They’re all things that are related to payment information.

The next one is a date custom property. Let me go ahead and open that up. Dates are actually stored as strings, and the display of the date format is based on the setting chosen when you create the custom property, as you can see here. You can uncheck this to default from the current date, but you can customize how you want your date to display using these settings down here.

The next is a flag custom property. The data type is always stored as true or false. However, the values that display are based on the settings chosen when you’re creating the custom property, so this can be updated to adjust to your preferences.

The next one is a list custom property. List values can be defined for things such as company or maybe you have an exception reason that you want your users to select from a predefined list. A list custom property would be perfect for that use.

Next would be a number custom property. There’s two different options for number custom properties, the first being decimal data type and the number fields that support both positive and negative numbers up to 16 digits. If there are zeros to the right of the decimal, they are suppressed. The other option is the currency format. Currency data type is a number field that will display as a currency defined using one of the ISO 4217 country codes. The default currency setting matches the local settings of your ImageNow client computer. Then here’s a couple more options down here for decimal if you wanted to fit the decimal to a fixed place or varying. Let me click on currency. Then you can also have this option for currency to punctuate at the thousands.

The next one is the string custom property. String is just a text field that supports all printable ASCII characters within the single-byte character set. The value can contain up to 128 characters.

Then the last custom property would be a user custom property. This custom property allows you to select a current user within the system. You could even define it down to a group. If you had a group that was dealing only with documents within their own group and they wanted to select user within their own group, you can narrow it down to that group. You could also update how that username displays, so either username, full name, or last name, first name.

That covers all of the custom property options. I know this is a brief review on the use of custom properties, but if you feel that your solution could use some more help with managing your current custom properties, or even benefit from adding custom properties, please visit our website at www.rpic.com, or contact us, and we would be happy to help. Thanks for watching.