User Defined Fields, Grids and Info Centers

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The most used and by far the easiest way of customizing Deltek Vision is the User Defined Controls feature. This allows you to add new fields and grids to any existing info center (like projects, employees, vendors, etc..) or even create your own new info centers from scratch.
Custom fields support all the data types you know from standard Vision like numbers, characters, dates, memo-fields, etc…
but you can also select any of the info centers (built-in and user defined) as data type which will allow you to link one record to another.

Sample

We will use a simple extension to the vendor info cenuter where we will create a specific user defined info center (UDIC) that will allow us to define geographical regions and then add a custom field to the vendor that will tie this record to specific vendors. We will later use this information in our custom report.

Step 1: Add Custom User Info Center

In Vision, go to ConfigurationGeneralUser Defined Controls and click on Create New Info Center
Enter these values into the dialog box

Field Value
Singular Name Vendor Region
Plural Name Vendor Regions
Info Center Name: UDIC_VendorRegion

By default the fields list show two entries: CustNumber and CustName. A UDIC must have at least one of these items (both will uniquely identify the record).
In our sample we remove the CustNumber row and only keep CustName. Then we will add the following items to the list:

Field Value
Label Description
Field Name CustDescription
Data Type Character
Length 100
Field Value
Label Sort Order
Field Name CustSortOrder
DataType Numeric
Decimals 0

Step 2: Add reference field to Vendor Info Center

Pick Vendor from the info center dropdown and in the Fields tab add a field with the following details to the list:

Field Value
Label Region
Field Name CustRegion
Data Type Vendor Regions

Final Steps

Now simply restart Vision and the new Info Center should appear in your menu list (if it does not please check the access rights of your role).
Enter a couple of regions and then go to the Vendor Info Center and pick a record. You will now be able to search and assign these new regions similar as you would for instance an employee record.

Additional Notes

All user defined fields, grids and info centers support Vision’s workflow engine. You can validate and calculate values in the same manner as you would do with the built-in info centers. We will see some of these techniques in a later article.

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This is an ongoing series in collaboration with Rhodium Digital where we present a number of different topics in regards to the latest Deltek Vantagepoint