Overview
When a client onboarding, account transfer, or compliance review moves through multiple workflow steps, every team member involved needs to stay current on what others have captured along the way. Without a reliable way to surface shared information, key context gets buried in individual tasks, and team members waste time re-entering data that already exists somewhere in the process.
Pinned fields solve this by making a set of Active Form fields visible across every task in a process, not just the one where they were created. A system administrator configures them once at the process level, and from that point forward, anyone working on any step in that process sees the same shared fields at the top of their Active Form. This article explains how pinned fields work and walks through the steps to configure them.
For a broader introduction to Active Forms, see our Configuring Active Forms in Sentir article.
Understanding Active Form Pinned Fields
Pinned fields carry over from one process task to the next, giving every team member involved in a process a consistent view of shared information. Rather than configuring these fields on a task-by-task basis, system administrators define them once at the process level. Each task in the process then displays those fields at the top of its Active Form under a dedicated section heading.
Consider a multi-step onboarding process where the advisor captures the client's investment objectives early on. With pinned fields, that information is visible to the operations team member completing the account setup steps later in the same process, without any additional data entry. The result is a more connected workflow where the right people always have the context they need.
Creating Active Form Pinned Fields
System administrators can create pinned fields on the Process Type record page, in the Pinned Active Form Fields tab. This tab is where you create the Active Form Field Section that will contain the pinned fields, as well as the pinned fields themselves. You also have the option to fine-tune which tasks display which pinned fields and adjust other display settings from this same location.
To create pinned fields for an Active Form:
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Click the App Launcher in the upper-left corner, then select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- In the Navigation Menu, select Process Types.
- Click the process name from the list of processes. If your process is not displaying, change the list view from Recently Viewed to All Process Types.
- On the Process Type record page, click the Pinned Active Form Fields tab.
- In the Active Form Sections area, click the New button.
- On the New Active Form Section tab, complete the Label and Order fields, then click Save.
- On the Active Form Section screen, click the caret in the Active Form Fields section and click New to add a field to the section.
- On the New Active Form Field tab, enter the following information:
- Label - The name of the field
- Process Type - This will default to the Process Type that the Active Form Field Section is related to, where the creation process began.
- Order - The order in which the field appears in the section.
- Type - Select a type, i.e., Date, Number, Text, etc.
- Required - If checked, then the user completing the Task will be required to populate this field first.
- Size - Select a size of the field. Either fit to column or full width.
- Display As - You can choose Editable, Read-Only, or Hidden.
- Prefill This Field - Optionally, you can have the field pre-filled with a static value or data from a record related to the process by selecting With a value from a related record. You will need to specify the path for the field using Salesforce formula syntax.
- Section - This will default to the value of the Active Form Field Section from which the process creation began.
- Display This Field If - Optionally, select and set display criteria to have this field render based on specific criteria.
- Help Text - Enter instructional text to assist end users in viewing the Active Form.
- Click Save to add the field or Save & New to save your work and add another field.
Considerations
When using Active Form pinned fields, please consider the following:
- Pinned and unpinned fields cannot appear within the same Active Form section.
- Each copy of a pinned field reads from the same underlying database record. When a user updates a pinned field's value, the updated value appears in every instance of that field across all tasks in the process, not just in the task where the update was made. If two users update the same pinned field simultaneously from different tasks, the most recently saved value will take precedence. Field values are saved when the user exits the field.
Pinned fields can be linked to a task's actions in the same way as standard task fields, and they behave identically.
- When specifying a prefill field path for a pinned field, if the field is located via the Active Form's lookup fields, then the lookup must also be a pinned field.
- When specifying a prefill field for an unpinned field, if the field is located via the Active Form's lookup fields, then the lookup must also be an unpinned field.
- When using a Rule Builder to specify criteria that reference Active Form Fields, pinned fields cannot reference values found in unpinned fields, and vice versa.
- Pinned fields appear on every screen of a multi-screen form.
- Repeating field sections are not compatible with pinned fields.
- Pinned fields are not visible in portals.
Pinned fields share the same configuration options as standard form fields, including whether a field is read-only or editable, its position within a section, and visibility rules that control whether it appears in a given process.
If you want the settings for a pinned field to vary from task to task, such as allowing a field to be editable the first time it appears but making it read-only for all subsequent appearances, you can manage these settings at the task level using the Task Availability & Settings related list on the Pinned Field record page.
- To report on pinned fields, you will need to set up Active Form field assignments. First, add a Save to Related Record action to save the data entered in the pinned field to a related record, such as a field on the related process or entity. Go to the process task and create the new action. From the Action record, click the caret in the Active Form Field Assignment area, then click New to create an Active Form field assignment.
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