Abacus Consulting, LLC

About 'Phantom' or 'Non-Displaying' Fields

If you have customized a Time Matters field before, you know it possible to specify a field type of hidden, thus preventing that field from appearing on the form. For our purposes, we are not talking about this type of field.  We are talking about a standard field type, such as 'text' that does not display on your form style due to the fact that the area type selected is showing fewer than the full complement of 9 fields per area.  In order to no confuse this field type with the hidden field, I user the term phantom field.

Each tab (Primary, Secondary or Additional) on the contact form can have up to 6 areas, depending on which layout your choose for the tab.  Each of these areas contains 9 fields.  When you designate an area to be a 6 or 8 field area, or even a memo or list area, your are not displaying all of the fields that exist for that area.  Specifically:

• If an area is a 6 field area, there are 3 phantom or unused fields
• If an area is an 8 field area, there is 1 phantom or unused field
• If an area is a memo area, there are 9 phantom or unused fields
• If an area is a list area, there are 9 phantom or unused fields
  

If you are using one of the area types above, it is possible to utilize any of the unused fields as calculated fields that will not be displayed on the form.

To do so, just change the area in question to an Address Area (USA) to reveal all of the available fields.  Identify which fields are not being used by the area when it is in its normal state, and customize one or more of those fields as a calculated field. Finally, change the area back to whatever area type it is normally.  Your phantom calculated fields now exist in the Time Matters database, and can be used in field links, searches and the like.

Note: A big tip of the hat to CIC Tom Rowe, who first pointed out the existence of these useful non-displaying fields.