Naming fields for hierarchical display

The field lists in the Sort window, the Expert search system, the Replace window and in the Export wizard can be displayed in the form of a hierarchic tree structure. This has nothing to do with broader and narrower terms, but is just intended to make the list of fields more organized, by grouping field names that "belong together". See the figure below for an example.

 

SortScreen

 

Only bold printed names represent fields that the user can select, although the entire field name may include higher nodes that are not printed in bold type. This is to make a distinction between higher nodes that themselves are selectable fields. In this example you can't select person or keyword because person and person.keyword aren't fields; if they were, they would be printed in bold type too.

The hierarchy in a field list is determined entirely by how data dictionary fields are named. In a field name a dot (.) is used for this purpose: simply separate words in a field name by a dot to let Adlib display this field name in a hierarchy, as can be seen in the example of the field name person.keyword.name above. If you want to group other fields under person > keyword, their names must also begin with person.keyword. For every language in which you want to present field names hierarchically, you have to name fields using dots.

Note that in field names you may also encounter underscores (_) to separate words in the name. This has no special meaning, it's just to make the field name better readably since spaces aren't allowed.

In general, you can change field names in your existing databases without getting into trouble, because although many properties in Designer can hold tags as well as field names, it is always the tag that is stored. The only location where field names may be stored instead of tags, is in Word templates. So if you change field names, check your Word templates for old field names that need to be changed too.