[Vtigercrm-developers] Meaning of the presence field in vtiger_field table?

[Alan Lord (News)]

Hi all,

We've been doing a bit of consulting for a business which has a rather 
old, but large, vtiger system built/hacked by a company called OnTAP.

It looks like it was based on a vtiger 4.x version.

Our client has software engineering skills in house and they have 
successfully migrated most, if not all, of their data into a clean 
vtiger 5.2 installation. :-)

One thing came up yesterday however when we looked at the custom fields 
which they'd migrated...

On the old database these fields had the "presence" value set to 0 and 
all seemed to work fine from a user's and an admin perspective.

On vtiger 5.2, these fields (especially picklists) were "not available" 
to users but were if you logged in as admin. Also, in the module 
manager, when editing a custom field, the "active" checkbox is greyed 
out (yet looks to be ticked) but you can't edit it; even as admin.

Creating a new custom field in 5.2 the only difference I could see is 
the value of the presence field in the vtiger_field table.

The old ones all had it set to "0". The new one we created set it to "2".

Can someone explain what this field is for and what the values indicate? 
I assume that this value's meaning has changed over time too, as on 
their old vtiger system they all appear to be set to "0" but work fine.

Cheers

Al

PS: I noted the comment on the wiki here 
http://wiki.vtiger.com/index.php/Creating_New_Fields_in_Existing_Modules 
but it doesn't mention a value of "2". (Whilst I was there I added the 
masseditable and helpinfo fields to the wiki page.)


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