Renaming fields

Synergetic is a very versatile program and has been designed to be used in all types of schools and organisations. In some cases, you want to change the labels for fields that appear on the screen to suit your needs or fine tune the system.

Warning: Use the Rename feature with caution as it makes it difficult for Synergetic Management Systems to answer your support queries as they will not know your local field names.
 

Example of renaming fields

You do not like the notation of Given 1 and Given 2 for people's name fields.

You prefer to call the fields First Name and Middle Name for all users.

 

Process for renaming fields

The process involved simply involves the modification of the Synergy.rl file that is located in your Synergetic directory. You can edit this file with any text editor, such as Notepad.

To modify the field names in Windows 8:

1. Start Windows Explorer.
2. Locate the Synergetic root directory.
3. Double click Synergy.rl.
   
   Note: If this file does not exist, create a new notepad document and rename it to Synergy.rl.
   
   
   
4. Click More options.
5. Click Notepad.
   
6. If required, clear the Always use the selected program to open this kind of file field.
   This ensures that Notepad is not associated with .RL files in future.
7. Edit the file.
   
   For example, to achieve the results in the first example, you need to add the following two lines at the end of the file:
   
   • |Given 1|First Name
   • |Other Given|Middle Name
   
   
8. Save the file.
9. Exit from Synergetic.
10. Start Synergetic.
    Synergetic uses the new Synergy.rl file to update the standard resource definitions.

To modify the field names in Windows 7:

1. Start Windows Explorer.
2. Locate the Synergetic root directory.
3. Double click Synergy.rl.
   Note: If this file does not exist, create a new notepad document and rename it to Synergy.rl.
   
   
4. Select Select a program from a list of installed programs.
5. Click Notepad.
    
6. If required, clear the Always use the selected program to open this kind of file field.
   This ensures that Notepad is not associated with .RL files in future.
7. Click .
8. Edit the file.
   
   For example, to achieve the results in the first example, you need to add the following two lines at the end of the file:
   
   • Given 1|First Name
   • |Other Given|Middle Name
   
   
9. Save the file.
10. Exit from Synergetic.
11. Start Synergetic.
    Synergetic uses the new Synergy.rl file to update the standard resource definitions. 

Additional information
This facility renames the labels in all areas that the original label appears in Synergetic. It does not however, rename the field labels within printed Crystal Reports.

If you need to rename Crystal Report field labels you can modify the required reports through the Crystal Report Designer (if you have it installed) and save into the Synergetic Reports\Site directory.

The RL file simply renames field labels as they appear on the screen, not the actual database fields. So when you are extracting data you must use the original field names. Ensure that your staff members know this if they need to customise any Crystal Reports or run database queries.

To restore the original field names, either delete or comment out the new lines in the Synergy.rl file by prefixing them with asterisks.

If the file already exists but has not yet been used, it contains the following brief notes on how to use the file effectively:

Additional considerations are:

• Resource Identifiers are not currently used but may be implemented in the future to identify a further break-down of field names.
• Asterisks at the beginning of the above code denote that the following text on that line is a comment. The code that you enter must be below this text and must not have an asterisk at the beginning of the line unless it is a comment.
• To insert a Pipe (vertical bar) between each field name, use Shift plus the relevant key on your keyboard, usually Shift + {}. The pipe is normally above the back-slash.