Rock U - People - Person Attributes

Transcribed Video Content

You probably already know by now that attributes are a very powerful part of Rock and person attributes are no exception. These are attributes that are specifically linked to the person entity. Now these are special because each organization uses person attributes differently. Some people, for example, will track, dietary restrictions or even someone's preferred service. So there's infinite ways you can use these attributes, but just start thinking about during this video ways you can use these attributes and I'll show you how you can set them up right now. To see person attributes, we'll just go straight to the person profile and there's actually a tab called extended attributes. So you'll see attributes all over for people, but this is an organized place where you'll see a lot of the most important ones and it's easy to come edit that information and also if you want to reorder the list on these blocks and these are simply just called attribute value blocks, you can easily do that and save and this helps you just source the attributes that are most helpful to you in the order that you want. But let's get into adding attributes. We'll start by going to admin tools then settings. We're actually not gonna start with a person attribute. We're going to go to attribute categories. And right now we're looking at all the person attribute categories. There's lots of them out of the box and they help us just organize the attributes that we're creating in a way that makes sense. So I suggest you add your person attributes to a attribute category, but let's add a new one. We're gonna call it sports ministry and it's always helpful to give a description just so other people know what you're using this thing for, then pick an entity type and it will be person here, meaning you can only add person attributes to this category. Let's pick an icon that makes sense, just pick a soccer ball, then you can pick a highlight color if you'd as well. But we'll just save this and now we'll go back to settings, start typing in person and we can add person attributes. So we have lots and lots out of the box, but we're gonna add new attributes to that category that we just created. One thing I wanna mention before that though is security can be really important as some of the info you store might be sensitive and if you want to secure an attribute, all you need to do is click the padlock. You can see who has view, edit, and administrate security by default. All users will be able to view, some will be able to edit, and only the administrator will be able to administrate. And you can also easily delete and search through these attributes. But now let's create those sports ministry attributes. So we'll make one called potential coach and also add a description. But one thing to note here is you can pick whether this is a public attribute. We're not gonna do it here, but a public attribute is one that you can leave open for non staff members to edit and change. For example, if this was potential coach preference and something that you wanted to allow people to change, you could make it public and allow people to change the value here, but this is just gonna be an internal field because we probably only want staff or volunteers to be able to update it. Then very important, pick the right category. Also note that the key here will be automatically generated, but it's something that you may end up using with Lava or workflows. So make sure this key makes sense to you and maybe is something memorable for you to access. You can also pick whether this person attribute is required. And if you wanna show this on bulk, meaning if you're doing a bulk update, you would be able to see this attribute as something that you could change in bulk. So that can be helpful if say you just got a large list of people and you have a list of people that would be potential coaches and you want to update this attribute for all of them at once. Now there's so many different field types you can pick for attributes such as text if you wanna use plain text, you can pick files, people, all kinds of things in Rock. But I think what makes sense here most is a boolean because generally you would just say potential coach true or false. So we'll just pick a control type of checkbox and we can just toggle this whether this person is a potential coach or not. Then there's also some advanced settings if you wanna do things add an icon so it's easier to recognize this attribute, add a color, or even history if you wanna be able to see how this attribute value changes over time. And you can suppress history logging and this, means the changes to the attribute values will not be recorded into the generic history log table so that you can save some space in your database. We'll click save. We're gonna add another attribute and just call this sports list and we're gonna pick the same category and we're gonna do a multi select. But I actually wanna show you something first. When you want someone to pick between multiple values, one of the best things you can do is use a defined value. And if you don't know about defined types and defined values, I suggest you watch our video on it as it's really crucial. It's a great way to add a list of things that are defined and you can access it from all sorts of places in Rock. If you change it on the defined type, then it will change everywhere. You don't have to worry about coming back and changing values and having a bunch of custom lists everywhere. But as an example, we can go through and pick one of our defined types we currently have record source and we'll immediately get to see all the defined values. People can multi select these and if you were to change it on the defined type, the defined value here would change. There's also some benefits you can allow multiple values, you can also display the descriptions if there's written descriptions for the values, you can change the way the picker looks if there's a long list, also include inactive defined values and you can allow people to add new values straight from the picker though that is pretty powerful. So be careful where you use that. But we'll look at if you don't wanna use a defined value, you just wanna create a list on the fly that you can select from, we'll show an example. Let's say we want our values to be basketball, football, soccer. These are the sports that we offer and there we go. Using this comma separated list, we've added a list of values to select from. You can also use Lava as the tool tip shows here if you wanna add a dynamic value and let's just go ahead and save this. Okay. And we're just gonna go right back to Ted Decker's profile and we're going to go to extended attributes. You'll notice that we haven't had that new category show up yet, but if you go edit a zone, you'll notice these blocks are all just attribute value blocks added. So we actually already have one that we've added for sports ministry, but this is how you find one of these blocks and you could click save to add it. But we're going to use this one we have and go to the block settings on that block and go to category, go pick the relevant category. And there's a couple other things you can do here to customize the block, but we're gonna save it. And then immediately you see that those values are popping up and we can actually go edit those person attributes that we created. So we can say for Ted, yeah, he's a potential coach. These are the different sports that he could be involved in, save, and there you go. Great. Now these custom attributes are available anywhere in Rock for you to use with people and how to easily update these attributes as well. Thanks for watching this video and have a great day.