In many cases, you will find yourself wanting to add the value of a referenced field onto a form. It could be taking a callers location, department, or company information and displaying it on the incident form, or adding a requests short description to a catalog task record. Although you could use a business rule to map the value of a field to another field (such as caller.location to the incident's location field), there are cases where it is simpler to display that original field. Using the concept of dot walking, you can actually display the value of referenced records fields on a form.
In this example, we will add the Caller's Business Phone, Company, and Department fields to the incident form, so that we can understand core Caller's information without needing to view their user record or using business rules to map their values to the form.
Example: Add a caller's fields to the Incident form
- The first step to adding dot-walked fields is to access the Form Layout option. To do this, navigate to the form view of the record you are attempting to edit, and right click the header (or select the three lines) to select Configure > Form Layout.
- Next, locate the reference field whose field values you want to add the the current record. For our example, we are using the Caller field, which references the user table. Click that field, and then select the 'Expand selected reference field' button. If the field is not a reference field, it will not allow for the [+] field expansion.
- After you expand the reference field, you will see the fields available on that table. In our example, select the VIP field from the expanded list and press the Add button.
- You can then adjust the location of where this field will appear by using the up and down arrows, or by saving the layout change and adjusting the location via the form designer.
Note: The fields on the incident are the actual fields on the user record, meaning changes to these fields on the incident form would change the actual user record.
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