Core Docs - Core Concepts - Person Attributes

Rock Version: v19.0
Last Modified: 2026-02-17 11:45 AM

Person attributes are a fundamental strength of Rock, so let’s spend some time unpacking this feature.

When to Use Person Attributes

Person attributes should be used any time you want to store the characteristics of an individual. There are a couple of situations when a person attribute may not be the best fit though. Ask yourself these questions before you add a new attribute:

Managing Person Attributes

Person attributes are managed from Admin Tools > Settings > Person Attributes. Each element of the person attribute is discussed in detail below.

As promised, let’s take a look at some attribute Field Type values and see how they can be used.

The field types above are the most common for person attributes, but others exist that we don’t cover in this guide. The other types may be useful in certain edge cases, but the ones detailed above should be all you need for most scenarios.

Securing Person Attributes

The list of person attributes on the screen above also gives you the ability to secure person attributes so only a limited number of people can view and/or edit them.

By default, All Users can view an attribute, but only Administrators can edit them.  

Displaying Person Attributes

Person attributes can be viewed and edited from any tab on the Person Profile page. This is done by adding the Attribute Values block to a zone and setting it to display a specific category of person attributes. This is very flexible because a person attribute can belong to more than one category.

To add a new block to a zone, use the Admin Toolbar at the bottom of the page. There you'll use the ti ti-columns to bring up the Zone Editor which will allow you to add a new block. For more information on the content management features of Rock be sure to see the Content Management guide.

Don’t limit yourself to adding Attribute Value blocks to only the Extended Attributes page. These blocks can be added under any of the tabs on the Person Profile page.  

Public Person Attributes

While it’s useful for your staff to see and edit person attributes from the Person Profile page, sometimes you may want to let people update their own attributes. For example, if you need to ask questions of people who are interested in serving, you can create person attributes for these questions and then use the Person Attribute Forms block on your external Rock site to prompt people for the answers to those questions. This block can be used to display any combination of person attributes and allows the person who’s logged in to fill out their own values. See the Add Blocks and Pages article for more details on that process.

Basic Usage

Once you’ve added the Person Attribute Forms block to a page, you can configure the forms and fields for it to display. Think of forms as pages that a person will navigate between using Next and Previous buttons. The fields are the person attributes to display on each form. Open the block's edit page to create the forms and select the fields. You can give each form a title to be displayed, and optionally add any header or footer HTML content to each form.

When adding a field to a form, there are several options for each field that can be set.