At a recent PD Place User Group meeting, the subject of the in-service Meta fields was raised and I promised to write a blog to expand on the purpose and usage of these fields. I hope this article sheds some light and helps unravel the mystery surrounding Meta fields.

The Meta Field functionality was added in PD Place Version 3.6 to meet the reporting needs of a new client. The client had a number of parameters that they wanted to track for each in-service that didn’t currently exist in PD Place, nor could any of the existing fields be utilized to meet their needs. The fields were primarily required by the Professional Development Group, when gathering statistics for reporting to management.

In brief, the Meta fields are simply user-defined fields, meaning each organization can define up to four unique fields that can be used to track information about the in-services they offer. This information is then used in the “Class Statistics” report to filter the results.

Many of you are probably quite familiar with how to setup the Meta field preferences, but I’ll briefly cover this for those not so familiar.

Defining Meta Field Preferences

The organization can define both the label associated with the field and the available options that can be selected from the dropdown lists displayed with each field. The following image shows a typical configuration of the Meta Fields in the preferences.

Note that the Meta fields have their own area in Preferences as indicated in the links displayed on the left-hand side. The “Meta Field options” are the values that appear in the dropdown list displayed on the in-service detail screen. They are entered on this screen separated by a pipe (“|”) character. If you leave both the name and option preferences blank, as I have for field # 4 above, the field will not display on the in-service screen.

Selecting Meta Fields on the In-service Detail Screen

At the bottom of the in-service detail screen, the above preference configuration will display as follows:

Here the user, when adding a new in-service, can select the appropriate options for each of the Meta fields form the dropdown lists. The dropdown list is the list of options provided in the preferences.

Class Statistics Report

The real power of the Meta fields is in the class statistics report. Here, the user can utilize the Meta fields to filter the results of this report and obtain a significant amount of information on the in-services offered. The following shows the filters available on the Class Statistics Report, the Meta fields being just a small part of a very powerful set of filters.

The power of this report and the Meta fields is contained in the results as shown in the simply example below:

In the above example, the user has filtered the results by one of the Meta fields “Level of Requirement” and the value of “Mandatory” was selected.

The results can give us the following information:

• A list of all in-services we offered, during the specified time period, which had a level of requirement set to mandatory.
• For each individual in-service we can see the number of days and hours of training offered, the number of spots available, and budgeted and actual costs.
• Totals for the number of in-services held, the total hours or days of training provided and the total budgeted and actual costs.

The number of filters available on this report can provide a powerful tool for “slicing and dicing” you information to generate all forms of information on specific categories or groups of in-services. The Meta fields can play an important role in this and provide you with filters that are unique to your environment.

In future releases, the Meta fields may also be expanded to advanced searching and other reports as required.

–Ron Grigg