Manage custom fields

You can manage Custom Fields through the Admin menu (click the cogwheel upper right hand side of Mautic).

Custom Fields

The Custom Fields page will let you view all existing Contact fields as well as any custom contact fields you have created.

You will notice the group column which will show you where the specific field will be shown on the Contact profile. In the last column, you may see several icons which signify various properties of the field:

1. Lock icon - These fields are unable to be removed as they are used by the core installation.
2. List icon - These fields can be used as filters of segments.
3. Asterisks icon - These fields are required when filling in the contact form
4. Globe icon - These fields are publicly updatable through the tracking pixel URL query (see Contact Monitoring for more details).

It is important to note that from Mautic 5, you will not be able to edit the default value for any Fields that are used to identify a Contact or Company, including:

• Email
• Company
• First name
• Last name
• Social profiles
• Unique identifier fields
• Company name
• Company Email
• Company website
• State
• Country
• City

Published Fields

There is a toggle switch which shows before each label title.\ This type of switch is used throughout the Mautic UI to publish and unpublish items.

Adding A New Field

You can create additional custom fields and define the data type you want that field to hold. In addition to the data type you will also select the group for that particular field. This will define where the field displays on the Contact edit and detail view.

Creating Custom Fields via a command

Each new Custom Field for Contacts or Companies adds a new column to the database. This operation gets slower with larger instances of Mautic, and it locks the table while it is running, meaning that no changes can be made until the field is created. It will also time out the HTTP request, so that the User Interface will report the column exists, but Contact/Company updates will actually fail, because the column is still missing.

There is a way around this when you configure the processing of field creation in the background.

Since Mautic 3.3 there is an option you can set in your app/config/local.php file: 'create_custom_field_in_background' => true,.

If this is configured, only the field metadata will be created, so you will be able to see the new Custom Field in the list of Custom Fields. It will be unpublished until a command bin/console mautic:custom-field:create-column runs. This command will create the actual column in the table and publishes the field metadata.

With this configuration enabled, the HTTP request timeout is prevented because the long running SQL query that is creating the new table column is handled in a background task.

The table lock issue can be mitigated if you run the command only once per day when you know that most of your audience is offline, therefore less traffic will be going into Mautic and there is less chance of this being a problem.