Company field in Contact Form

[sunnydd]

Hello everyone:

I would like to make the company field in the contact screen be a dropdown list containing the names of companies in the company list.  Is this possible?  I searched in help and couldn't find the company in the list of dropdown fields.

Thanks.

[m4y]

No, it is not possible out of the box...

[sunnydd]

Thanks.  Is this something I would able to accomplish using the SDK?

[m4y]

Probably... But why don't you use the button next to the company field? It is the better way to populating the company list from the contact view...

[sunnydd]

Mostly because we don't want the users to be able to type anything in the Company field.   We want to make sure that a company record exists for every contact.  Is there an easier way to accomplish this?

Thanks.

[GLComputing]

No... you could make a request for this here - http://www.act.com/community/feature/index.cfm

[GLComputing]

Actually, the drop-down wouldn't work.

You can have unlimited Company records and building this list with havery screen change would be a HUGE drain on resources.

It may still be a possible feature to prevent typing in the field and force the use of the link button, but I doubt enough users would want it to make Sage do it.

If it's really important, I can only suggest getting an addon developer to see if they can tweak something to do this

[nbohne]

It would certainly be possible with an SDK addon, in the form of a custom layout object, but it really would be a drain on resources, at least once you got over ~1000 companies. I really think just training into your users that they link a contact when they create it would be a lot better, it's easy enough to track all newly created contacts and see by Record Creator who didn't bother to fill the field out..

[sunnydd]

Thank you.  It might have been worth exploring, until you mentioned the "drain",  so we will just have to proceduralize the process and check with various reports.

Thanks again.

[GLComputing]

I haven't tested this, but if the Company field was covered over in the layout (but still leaving the button on the left) and making it required... this might be a solution that would give a similar result.

Or even a field entry trigger on the company field that, if the field is empty, automaticlly pushes the button?