Custom Field Attributes

For Long Text Area fields, set the number of lines to be shown on Edit pages. You can show from 2 through 50 lines (the default is 6 lines). If the text doesn't fit in the specified number of visible lines, scroll bars appear. Long Text Area fields are fully shown on detail pages and printable views.

This attribute's value isn't respected for Long Text Area and Rich Text Area fields in Lightning Experience.

For auto-number fields, enter a Display Format to control formatting details such as the minimum number of leading zeros and any prefix or suffix for the number.

Begin by entering the required minimum {0} as a placeholder for the auto-number without any leading zeros. Add any prefix to your number before this placeholder and insert any suffix text after the placeholder. Insert any date prefixes or suffixes in the form of {YY}, {YYYY}, {MM}, or {DD}, which represent the record creation date in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

For information on using auto-number formats when entering your Display Format, see Auto-Number Formatting Examples.

Available on external objects only. Maps the custom field to an external data source’s table column.

For a lookup relationship field, specify the external table column that contains 18-character Salesforce IDs.

For each object that can have custom fields, you can set up to 25 custom auto-number, email, number, or text fields as external IDs. An external ID field contains record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce.

You can use an external ID field to update or upsert records using the API. When using the API or the Data Import Wizard for custom objects and solutions, you can use this field to prevent duplicates by also marking the field as Unique.

Custom fields marked as Unique count against an object's limit of 25 External ID fields. Custom indexing that occurs automatically in the background by Salesforce doesn’t count against External ID limits.

Not available for external objects. Each external object has an External ID standard field. Its values uniquely identify each external object record in your org.

For external object fields of type text, specifies this custom field as the name field for the external object. Not available for text area fields. By default, the External ID standard field is the name field for the external object.

If you select this checkbox, make sure that the External Column Name specifies a table column that contains name values. Each external object can have only one name field.

For internal use only, Salesforce stores the value of the name field from each row that’s retrieved from the external system. This behavior doesn’t apply to external objects that are associated with high-data-volume external data sources.

For geolocation fields, determines how the latitude and longitude notation appears in the Salesforce interface.

For example, the coordinates for San Francisco can be expressed as:

Latitude: 37° 46' 30" N, Longitude: 122° 25' 5" W or

Latitude: 37.794016°, Longitude: –122.395016°

Regardless of the notation you choose to show in the interface, latitude and longitude are stored in Salesforce as decimals.

For number, currency, and percent fields, the number of digits you can enter to the left of the decimal point, for example, 123.98 for an entry of 3.

Changing the number of digits (either manually or through workflow rules) can result in truncated values in Salesforce Classic and no value changes in Lightning Experience. This example shows this behavior. In Lightning Experience, the record shows the percentage as 1,235,689.22% and in Salesforce Classic, the percentage appears as 689.22%.

• Create a percentage field with a length of 16 and 2 decimal places.
• Create a record that includes the field with set the value to 1235689.22.
• Change the percent field digits to a length of 3.

For text fields encrypted with Classic Encryption, determines which characters are hidden and the use of dashes in the field. Masked characters are hidden using the character selected in Mask Character. Available options are:

Mask All Characters

All characters in the field are hidden.

Last Four Characters Clear

All characters are hidden but the last four are shown.

Credit Card Number

The first 12 characters are hidden and the last four are shown. Salesforce automatically inserts a dash after every fourth character.

National Insurance Number

All characters are hidden. If the field contains nine characters, Salesforce automatically inserts spaces after each pair of characters. Use this option for UK NINO fields.

Social Security Number

The first five characters are hidden and the last four are shown. Salesforce automatically inserts a dash after the third and fifth characters.

Social Insurance Number

All characters are hidden but the last three are shown. Salesforce automatically inserts a dash after the third and sixth characters.

Makes the field required everywhere in Salesforce. Not available for external objects.

You must specify a Default Value for required campaign member custom fields.

Don’t assign default values to fields that are both required and unique, because uniqueness errors can result. See Require Field Input to Ensure Data Quality.

For roll-up summary fields, choose the type of calculation to make:

• COUNT: Totals the number of related records.
• SUM: Totals the values in the field that you select in the Field to Aggregate option. Only number, currency, and percent fields are available.
• MIN: Displays the lowest value of the field that you select in the Field to Aggregate option for all directly related records. Only number, currency, percent, date, and date/time fields are available.
• MAX: Displays the highest value of the field that you select in the Field to Aggregate option for all directly related records. Only number, currency, percent, date, and date/time fields are available.

For auto-number fields, enter a Starting Number that’s less than 1 billion. Select Generate Auto Number for existing records to automatically number all current records that begin with the starting number that you enter. If deselected, the next record that you enter is assigned the starting number and your older records are blank in this field. For leads, only unconverted leads are assigned a number.

When you create records, the Starting Number value increments to store the number that will be assigned to the next auto-number field created. You can’t edit Starting Number after creating an auto-number field. To edit a Starting Number value, change your auto-number field to a text field and then back to an auto-number field. To restart Starting Number values for fields on objects from a managed package, uninstall and then reinstall the package.

Be sure that you don’t create records with duplicate auto-number values.

An auto-number field can contain up to 10 digits and up to 20 extra characters for your prefix or suffix.

• You can’t retrieve the starting number of an auto-number field through Metadata API. To specify a Starting Number while deploying, add a startingNumber tag for your field to your package.xml file. For example: <startingNumber>42</startingNumber>
• If you deploy without specifying a Starting Number value in your package.xml file, the default starting number for standard fields is 0. The default starting number for custom fields is 1.

If checked, prevents duplicate field values.

For text fields, you can control whether values that are identical except for their case are considered unique. Select Treat "ABC" and "abc" as duplicate values to enforce case-insensitive uniqueness, or select Treat "ABC" and "abc" as different values to enforce case-sensitive uniqueness.

Some characters have both single-byte and double-byte versions. For example, all the following characters have single-byte and double-byte versions: “!@#$%^&*(){}[]\|:";',.<>?/~`”.

For the purpose of unique field value comparison, the single-byte and double-byte versions of these characters are considered identical.

Superscript characters aren’t treated as unique characters. Text such as ABC² and ABC2 are considered identical.

Custom fields marked as Unique count against an object's limit of 25 External ID fields. Custom indexing that occurs automatically in the background by Salesforce doesn’t count against External ID limits.