Custom Fields v2 migration

About half a year ago we announced the switch to a new architecture of custom fields.

Over the past several months, the Targetprocess Support team has been working with all customers that we found had conflicting Custom Fields of mismatched types in the system. If you were contacted but haven’t updated such custom fields, it’s high time to perform this change.

As of October 17, 2022, the previous version of Custom Fields will no longer be supported.

If there are any remaining conflicting Custom Fields at that date, they will be automatically renamed to support the newer version of the Custom Fields implementation. If any of those now automatically renamed fields are used in automation rules, validation rules, metric formulas, and filters, those rules, formulas, and filters will stop working. You have to manually check and update the affected rules, formulas, and filters to use new names.

Why do Custom Fields get a new architecture?

We’ve been working on Custom Fields improvements for more than a year now. The main driver for these changes was the inefficient data storage and the lack of history for Custom Fields. We are gradually introducing this history for custom fields in existing functionalities like Audit History, REST API, and History Reports.

How to check if you're affected?

The new Custom Fields architecture has the following constraints:

• It isn’t allowed to create Custom Fields that have the same name but different value types. For example, if there is a Custom Field named "test" for User Story with a type "number", all other Custom Fields named "test" should also have the type "number" in the system.
• The maximum length of Custom Field names is restricted to 100 characters.

This is how you can check if you have conflicting custom fields via "Settings > Custom Fields" yourself: Sort the Custom Fields overview table by Name and check if there are any Custom Fields across all the Processes that have the same Name but have different Types.

How to fix your Custom Fields?

Depending on how the particular Custom Fields are used, there are 3 possible ways:

• Changing the data type of some of the Custom Fields

For example, if you have a text field that contains a number, we can convert the type of this Custom Field to a number without data loss. If this is the option that you prefer, please contact the Targetprocess Support team with the details.

• Renaming some of the Custom Fields

You can rename the Custom Fields that have different Types. But remember to Check and Update Automation Rules, Validation Rules, Metrics, and filters in Views and in Reports to use the new Custom Field name!

• Deleting unused Custom Fields

Delete Custom Fields if they are no longer in use.

If you have any issues updating Custom Fields, you can reach our support team at tp-support@apptio.com, and we’ll help you with this task.