Do Not Alter Field Names in Reporting

Related products: CS Reports & Dashboards

When I select a field that is part of a lookup table, not the native table (for example, I am building a report from Call to Action and I select fields from Company) the report builder changes the name of the field from its actual value to the table name, then the field name.

This is adding unnecessary time to my day because I have to go in and remove the prefix from all of the fields. 

If I want to build a report w/ a bunch of Company field names, I have to go and edit each field to remove “Company” from each of the field names now. Sometimes I add up to 20 fields from the Company object.

Please REVERT BACK to before when this did not occur.

 

I feel like a configurable toggle should be easy to implement here. Even if we wanted to keep a prefix, we can’t use ‘Company’ since we refer to that object as ‘Client’.

 

Thanks for keeping admin simplicity in mind!


Why would a consumer of a report care which table the field came from? All they care about is the field name, right? 

This seems like an ehancement for Admins that had a downstream impact to people that receive reports, which on a large level are SLT members that don’t want to have to read the same prefix over and over to quickly understand what field they are looking at.

Please REVERT BACK!


Hi @amanda.caldwell, I believe this is already an option in Report settings. The toggle name should be “Enable Named Fields Additions” under Reports > Settings > General Settings. Toggling this off should give you what you’re looking for. Here is the full documentation on it.

 


hi @kstim - thank you for your suggestion! i tried this and it did not work. 

here’s what support said about that toggle: 

Yeah, unfortunately the Enable Named Fields Additions Toggle only changes the behavior of pulling in the Lookup Field on the parent table to the Show Me section, ie. the Company Lookup (ID) lookup on the Call to Action Object would pull in the Named field (typically Company Name) rather than the ID field (Company GSID). 
 


Super interesting idea, @amanda.caldwell 

I’ve really enjoyed the helping hand in the field naming. Maybe it’s my “old age” in Gainsight years, but I can remember building reports--and especially drill-downs--where I had a sea of fields labeled “Name” with no way to discriminate among them. The prefix was a nice and welcome surprise for me when it arrived.

That said, I can understand how having to relabel 20 fields in a report is time not well spent.


@matthew_lind - in a perfect world….ADMINS/report builders see the view in Report Builder w/ the attached table names. But, when the report’s on a dashboard, the names display like the old days. That would be MOST ideal :)