Custom fields can be incorporated into participant profiles as a single value which gets updated as it changes or as a value specific to a registration.
This is set in Personalization > Field settings.
Most fields should be single value.
Single-value fields are like a permanent attribute of the profile which get pulled in on future registrations, but can be updated as needed.
Registration-specific fields do not carry over from registration to registration. They do not have all the capabilities as single value fields and are not quite as easy to work with.
The driving factors for whether to set up a field group as single value or registration-specific are:
- Whether you expect it to change over time AND
- You want to keep a historical record of all the different values.
If both of those things are not true, you should set up the field group as single value. Let's use a few examples.
- Birthdate. You would not expect this to change over time. So you would set it to a single value field.
- Phone number. You might expect this to change at some point. But when it does change, you don't really care about the old phone number. So you would set it to single value.
- Grade Point Average. This could go either way. If all you care about is their most current GPA, you would set this up as a single value. But if you needed to keep the GPA they had for a given season for eligibility purposes, you would need to define it as a registration-specific field in order to maintain the history.
There are some differences in viewing the registration-specific fields on a profile as well as reporting on them.
- Registration-specific fields won't be available when you export participants from the Participants report. They are only available when you export registrations (because you have linked them to registrations).
- They are not mixed in with the other fields, but rather each registration entry at the bottom of a participant profile would have this list (and it would be blank or filled in).
- When people register, the registration-specific fields look the same as single value fields, including their style (text input, checkboxes, dropdowns, etc.). But on the participant profile in the registration entries, the registration-specific fields lose their styling.
If you are unsure about whether to make one of your fields single value or registration specific, we advise you to make it single value.