Overview

A Custom Field represents structured data about a person or other object in VAN, configured by a VAN user. A Custom Contact Field is a Custom Field applied to People.
A Custom Contribution Field is a Custom Field applied to Contributions.
A Custom Disbursement Field is a Custom Field applied to Disbursements. These are the only types of Custom Fields available via the API.

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Note

Custom Contact Fields may only be assigned to Contacts in My Campaign mode; assignment is not available in My Voters mode.

Custom Fields are collected into Groups for better organization and administration. For example, a committee which works heavily with college students might have a Custom Fields Group called "Student Custom Field Group", with fields such as "Selected field of study", "Name of high school", etc.

Every Custom Field has a data type, which indicates what kind of data will be accepted for that custom field. The data types, and restrictions on the data available, are as follows:

  • Boolean: accepts only true or false
  • Selection: accepts only one of the available values belonging to the custom field
  • Text: accepts any text, limited by the maximum number of characters stipulated in the custom field
  • Date: accepts only dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD
  • Number: accepts numeric values, limited by the maximum number of characters stipulated in the custom field
  • Money: accepts currency amounts
    Custom Fields of type Selection may have parents to indicate hierarchies within the available values. The parent of a Custom Field must also be a Selection field, and is usually used to indicate a higher level of groupings for the available values. If a Custom Field has a parent, then each of its available values also has a parent, and each parent is an available value in the parent custom field. For example, if one custom field indicates "Field of study" for college students, then its parent custom field might indicate "Department", and their available values might be organized as follows:

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Note

Only Custom Contact Fields may have parented custom fields.

  • Physical sciences (available value for Department)
    • Biology (available value for Field of study; parent available value is Physical sciences)
    • Chemistry (available value for Field of study; parent available value is Physical sciences)
  • Liberal arts (available value for Department)
    • History (available value for Field of study; parent available value is Liberal arts)
    • English (available value for Field of study; parent available value is Liberal arts)