Support for Time Zone, Customizable Home Page and List View Settings, Printable Reports and more..

At iFreeTools, we prioritize our features by listening to our users. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been adding the following features to iFreeTools, based on suggestions from our users..

• Support for Time Zones
• Customizable Home Page
• Support for viewing additional attributes from referenced parent records, in child record's list views.
• Customizable View Settings (Columns to View, Page Size, etc.,)
• Printable Reports (List & Chart Views)
• Pop-up selection for reference values.
• Option to hide Created On, Updated On and Notes in custom Entities.

Details of the new features are given below :

Support for Time Zones

Until now, we had been displaying date-time values in UTC. Now, users can choose to display the date-time values in their time-zone. Just select the required time-zone value in Admin > App Settings and have it reflected in all views.

Customizable Home Page

You can now configure the home page contents (apart from just the About page, until now), from Admin > App Settings. This will be used as the content of your home page when accessing from your domain.

Within the home page contents, you may use BBCode for safe-rendering of HTML content. The supported BBCode tags you may use are : b, i, u, s, link, img, list with *, size, color and center.

Such a sample content provided in the App Settings is shown below.


The resulting page when accessed via the configured domain is shown below.

Live link of that sample home page : http://acme.sahasvat.com

Support for viewing additional attributes from referenced parent records, in child record's list views

It is typical requirement to view a parent record's attributes along with the child record's attributes in list views - for example, attributes from Account records (parent) shown along with Contact records (child).

Earlier we only had a link to the Account record details; but now, you can view values from the Account record right in the list of Contact records.

When creating or editing Custom Views, you can select the attributes you want to be displayed and it will get shown in the client.

[Screen-shot of this feature, shown along with next feature]

Customizable View Settings (Columns to View, Page Size, etc.,)

Apart from including the parent attributes in the list views of client (previous item), you can also specify the columns you want to make visible from the client's attributes. Other attributes will still be loaded in the client, but will not be visible. They can be toggled for visibility from Instant Details, as was possible earlier.

You can also specify the page-size and optionally disable the Instant Details and search-while-typing features. This can be configured at a Custom View level or at the app level from Admin > App Settings.

The following image shows the new features of selecting additional attributes from referenced parent records and customizable view settings..

Printable Reports (List & Chart Views)

Now all list views and chart views have an option to have a printable view. This view will be without the header, side-bars, footers and advertisements.

This feature is accessible from under Options in the list views and as a top-level button in chart views.

Pop-up selection for reference values.

Until now the reference value selection was possible only from select boxes. While this is fine if the number of values is less, this can be difficult to use in case there are more options from which to choose from.

From now on, if the options are more than 20, iFreeTools will automatically provide a pop-up option to choose the reference value. This option will enable selection from a list view, where you can sort and search the records and then select the required record instance for reference.

Option to hide Created On, Updated On and Notes in custom Entities.

This feature is applicable for iFreeTools Creator - which allows creating custom entities. You may now opt to *hide* the default attributes added to an custom entity, which are date-time stamps for Created On and Updated On and the text attribute Notes.

This only hides the attributes and can be re-enabled back again at any time.

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By choosing to use our products, you show your commitment to us. Our way of thanking you for this, is to listen to your feedback and acting on it, so as to help you use our tools better.

Keep sending in your suggestions.

Instant Search now available in iFreeTools CRM

We told you search was "Coming soon.." when we introduced Advanced Views late last week and now, it has arrived in iFreeTools CRM.

This comes a day after Instant Details and Customizable Columns were added to Advanced Views.

Advanced Views now have a "search as you type" feature, shown in action below..

The search string is matched against values from all the columns in table view. If you want to include a property for the search, just add it as a column of the table and proceed to search.

Advanced Views is Javascript powered and works best in modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox - which we use extensively for our testing. While it does work in IE (it can be a bit slow), we recommend better browsers.

There is also an option to disable "Search while typing", which makes search operations to begin only after clicking on the Search button. This can be useful when using browsers like IE.

Keep sending in your feedback on Google App Engine powered iFreeTools CRM. We listen, and more importantly we act and we deliver - fast.