Best practices for custom fields in Empower - WKB72986

ENVIRONMENT

• Empower
• Custom fields

ANSWER

• Limit the number of the 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 sub-expression be limited to a maximum of eight.
• 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".)
• 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 multiple processing.
• Empower will read through the custom fields in alphabetical order. If you are averaging another custom field, it is best 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.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION