Field Mappings in Crelate offer a very powerful tool to take data from your custom forms and immediately map that directly to a contact, company, or opportunity record. If you're looking for a quick basic how to guide, check that out here: Setting up Field Mappings. This purpose of this article is to dig more in depth as to some of the values of field mappings and when it may, or may not, be necessary.

With field mapping configured, you may map either to several default fields, any custom field or any tag category. Please note, not all default fields can be mapped to. You can map to name, salary, salary details, description among several others.

When data is mapped, it offers the unique ability to easily display data on a record. As opposed to opening the form you may simply view that data directly on the record itself. This is typically best served with dates, numeric, or picklist values. If the question is more of a free text or long answer field, it may likely not need to be mapped. One important note, whether or not you configure a field mapping for a particular question, the data will remain searchable in either scenario (more on that below).

You'll notice in the example below, we have one question that is mapped (question #2) and one question (question #1) NOT mapped but answered in our form.

Both are still completely searchable. Questions in activity forms that are not mapped may be queried through the individual question in search by enabling advanced and selecting Activity Form Responses.

In the case where field mapping is utilized, you may select the individual field (whether default or custom) and pull in that field as a unique column in your view.

Now that you understand the basics, let's get moving to create custom forms and field mappings!