Best practices for custom fields in Empower - WKB72986

ENVIRONMENT

• Empower
• Custom fields

ANSWER

• All custom fields in the project are calculated, regardless of whether they are used.
• The customer should copy only the minimum required custom fields into a new project. (Copy them as required; do not "copy all".)
• Limit the number of custom fields that rely on other custom fields. 
  • It is better to have single custom fields where possible, but this will depend on the customer's requirements. To aid readability, we recommend that the levels of nesting be limited to a maximum of eight.
• Summary custom fields are processed in alphabetical order. Capital letters take precedence over lowercase letters (for example, ZZZ will be processed before aaa).  
  • If a custom field depends on another custom field, the fields must be alphabetically named so that they process in the correct order.
  • Improperly alphabetized fields may require the user to process multiple times.
• Empower processes the custom fields in alphabetical order. If you are averaging within a custom field, it is necessary to name the field calculating the average in a way that has it fall after the field being averaged, alphabetically. This will ensure that the field being averaged has had a chance to be calculated, before the field doing the average tries to calculate the average.
• Summary and inter-sample calculations will only populate a result when the underlying fields are populated in the database first.
• When using GTE (or LTE) both values must be handled the same i.e. both values must be rounded or both values must not be rounded
• It is not advised to ROUND inside Average functions. Rounding is intended for use only for the final value of a calculation and is not intended for use with interim values.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION