Field names

Each item of information or data you wish to store, manipulate or extract using Ability, must be uniquely accessible by the entire Ability system. Ability does this by calling on the address of the data, whose location is identified by the database title, table name, field name and record number.

You specify the field name in the Name cell. It is usually helpful if it is easily identifiable by you as well, a year or two after you created the table, so make the name relatively descriptive. For example:

first_name

last_name

The underscore character is often used as a link between words. These examples could be reduced in length without losing any clarity. For example:

FirstName and LastName

or

fname and lname

This will save typing effort if later on you use these field names in computed fields or in links with other Ability applications.

Note: The following rules should be observed with regard to field names. They can be up to 64 characters long, and contain any mixture of letters, numbers and underscores. They cannot contain spaces, periods, commas, colons, brackets, slashes or other punctuation marks, nor can they contain hyphens, dashes or ASCII characters. The names of pre-existing functions, such as "Sum" or "Title", are also inadmissible. The following are all legitimate field names:

bank_account

BankAccount

bankaccount

bank_acc

bank_acc_1

BankAcc1

For more details of how to create fields in a database, see Creating fields in a database.