How to update a Udef field

Audience:

api

• 2 minutes to read

The contact has a property named UdefHelper, which lets you handle user-defined fields easily.

You can assign or update the values on a user-defined field of a contact via the UdefLarge and UdefSmall properties. However, it requires you to work with the physical field names such as string04 which give no meaning and can therefore be tricky. The UdefHelper shields the physical field names and lets you work with logical names instead.

Code

using SuperOffice;
using(SoSession mySession = SoSession.Authenticate("SAL0", ""))
{
  //Retrieve a contact
  Contact contact = Contact.GetFromIdxContactId(37);

  // Update the Udef fields using udefHelper
  // You have to pass the progId which identifies the field to the udefHelper
  contact.UdefHelper["SuperOffice:1"] = "Value 1";
  contact.UdefHelper["SuperOffice:2"] = "Value 2";
  contact.UdefHelper["SuperOffice:3"] = 1234;

  //Save the changes
  contact.Save();
}

Walk-through

In the above example, we refer to a particular user-defined field by using a string called the progId. It is stored under the progId field of the udeffield table. These values stay constant throughout the life of a field even if the name or the type of the field is changed.

If the progId is blank, we can assume it to be equal to "SuperOffice:" + udeffield.identity (For example, SuperOffice: 1).

Identity is a sequence number that is allocated whenever you create a new user-defined field. This is not an ID field, but it remains unchanged between different versions of the same user-defined fields. Just like progId, the identity field also remains a constant throughout the lifetime of a user-defined field.

The main purpose of the progId is to facilitate 3rd-party developers to make their fields with a name they can use in their code to find their user-defined fields again.