Datafield predefines

Introduction

Predefines are, as the name suggests, predefined values for particular datafields. They are primarily used as aides for users who make use of clauses that contain datafields.

Say you have created a condition where, upon filling out the applicable law of the contract, the competent court is filled out as well. This condition could look like this:

Any disputes arising out of #°contract shall be submitted the courts of {#applicable-law^country= "France": Paris | = "Belgium": Brussels | = "Netherlands": Amsterdam}.

Naturally, users must be aware that they have to fill out either “France”, “Belgium” or “Netherlands”. To help them use this datafield, you can set these values as predefines. When users are about to assign a value to this datafield in assemble document, they will have the option to select from these predefined values, thus ensuring they can make optimal use of the intelligence embedded in the clause:

When you insert this datafield into a question via the option in Design Q&A mode, the predefines will also automatically be displayed.

Fixing the predefined values

In the example condition above, no account is taken of the situation where the applicable law is not French, nor Belgian or Dutch. Therefore, the condition would not work when, for example, “Germany” is filled in as a country. To avoid that situation, you can check the following option when editing the predefines:

This will prevent users from filling out a value that is not included in the predefines list and thus ensure that datafields that make extensive use of certain values function correctly.

Optional labels

Much like datafields themselves, predefines can also use labels. This can be useful for the situation where you use an abbreviated version of the value for the sake of brevity (e.g.: “prop-dmg” instead of “property damage”). To activate these labels, simply click when filling out the predefines.

When inserting predefined valuesin a Q&A question, it can be very tempting to use wording that can be inserted as such in the text of a document. This is a reasonable approach for short words to be inserted, but quickly becomes exhibits multiple problems when inserting larger chunks of texts, or when you are dealing with a multilingual text. Read all about it on our separate help page.