How often you need to add the additional information such as salary or department to your application users’ records?
Usually you can do it by creating a table (say, User Properties table) with column of User type as a key and adding necessary additional properties as columns of this table. Whenever you need this info for the user recorded in some other table you can relate two tables and extract all necessary information via lookups.
The problem arises when you need to extract this information for the current user, typically when defining access rights such as “Allow view records related to the people from my department”. Before you would need a formula column calculating User() formula and a relationship to user property table and a column to extract the value. But situation gets worse since you need to do it for every table you need this information in.
With “native” support for User Property table it’s all much easier now.
First, enable User Property Table feature under Setup > Labs. Once enabled, visit Setup > Sharing / Roles > Set User Property table. TeamDesk will propose you to select existing table having a User column as a key column, or create a new one:
Once user table is selected, it will be extended with E-Mail, First Name, Last Name, Screen Name, Role, Default Set, External Customer and Last Access read only columns containing live snapshot from the information found in setup section.
Also you’ll have couple of new options.
* For any column of user type you can create lookups to the information stored in user tables right from the column’s view screen:
* Wherever you need an information from User Properties related to current user, you can simply refer to the column of User Properties table by its name.
* Setup’s Manage Users page is extended with button to edit corresponding record in User Property table.
Obviously users just invited do not have a record in User Properties. For such users the button is named “Add User Property” and creates new record with user’s dropdown pre-selected.
