Background

Mifos system has a definite set of fields through which the information of each entity is captured. For example, client, group, center information is captured during creation. In this system, the most commonly captured information has been built in and In addition to these pre-defined fields, if an MFI needs to capture some extra information, the "additional information" section can be utilized and the rules around these can be specified during the field definition

Feature Summary

The objective of this feature is to enable MFI's to capture some specific data which may not be present in the system. Additional fields can be defined for the following entities:

• Clients
• Groups
• Centers
• Office
• Personnel
• Loan accounts
• Savings accounts

When an additional field is defined, following information should be captured:

S No.

Attribute Name

Data Type

Range

Can be Modified After Definition?

Description Notes

1

Category

Drop Down

Client; Group; Center; Loan; Savings; Personnel; Office

No

2

Name

Alphanumeric

N/A

Yes

Any changes are applicable to all the existing and new records or accounts.

3

Type

Drop Down

Text; Date; Integer; Single select; Multi select

No

4

Default Value

Same as

N/A

Yes, except for multi select fields

Any changes are applicable to all the new records or accounts.

5

Mandatory/Optional Checkbox

N/A

No

Any changes are applicable to all the new records or accounts

Additional information

• The additional fields will come at the bottom of the page
• If there are no additional fields defined for an entity, the header "additional information" should not be displayed on create, edit and details pages
• The back end for these additional fields is partially done in version 1 of Mifos. The data types - numeric, text and date have been defined and these have been integrated with all the entities.
• Data types - drop down and multi select have not been developed
• The front-end for this feature has not been implemented in version 1 of the product.
• An existing additional field cannot be deleted or made inactive
• An existing optional field should not be marked as mandatory as this can cause conflicts in the existing records (Emily: Is this true? Can't a user change a non-mandatory field to mandatory? It simply means that when a user next edits the record, they will be prompted to enter this value-- which is a good thing)
• There is no restriction for the total number of additional fields for each entity, nor the number of additional fields for each data type.

Open Issues

• How we handle default values for fields that are marked "mandatory": Default values are used when savings accounts are auto created or (in future)- multiple loan accounts will be created. So if a field is marked mandatory, but no default value is entered-- these features may not work. If we do keep the feature of specifying default values-- we need to find a way to do this intuitively for single select data types.

UI Prototype

Look under latest UI prototypes Unzip the file, click on "admin" tab, look at bottom of left column under "Data Display and Rules", and click on "Define additional data fields".

Main.emilytucker - 08 Mar 2005