Smart fields

Certain fields available for user-defined reports, views, and queries do more than select a specific piece of data. These fields, called smart fields, combine multiple pieces of data or decide which data to display based on what is available. You can use smart fields to provide time-saving flexibility when you mine information in your database.

For example, you create a query of all donors in your database who gave $10,000, along with their first gift date. You routinely run this query, which takes a considerable amount of time to execute due to the size of your database and the complexity of the query—the server must calculate the total for every record in your database. As the number of records in your database increases, the time necessary to run the query also increases. When you replace the summary fields in the query with smart fields, you improve the time it takes to run the query considerably. The program automatically generates and caches the smart field values at intervals set by your system administrator. In addition, smart field updates consider only records added to the database since the last run date and do not reconsider records already included in the value.