List and Checklist Hints

Field value mapping

For fields which are List of specific choices or Checklist of specific choices, you have the option of mapping displayed values to different stored codes. What does this mean? Let's take the hypothetical scenario of the field "Preferred swag". It has the values:

If you don't check the box Map displayed values to different stored codes, VSys stores the value "T-shirt", "Sweatpants" or "Baseball cap" for each person. This is fine until you decide next year to rename one of the values from "Baseball cap" to "Sports cap" in order to avoid being sport-ist. When you do that, the stored values for people who preferred baseball caps are no longer valid!

Instead, if you did use stored codes, your setup could look like this:

Now, VSys doesn't store "Baseball cap", it stores "C" instead. Changing the description for "Baseball cap" to "Sport cap" means that everyone who previously had "Baseball cap" as their preference now has "Sport cap" - no confusion.

Importing

When importing fields using the Interactive File Importer or the General File Importer, VSys lets you use either the value's description, e.g. "T-shirt", or its stored value, e.g. "T". It's important to make sure that you don't have two values with the same description or code, or VSys may import your data in an unexpected way.