About Creating Custom Data
When you work with tasks, projects, and issues, you may need to create custom forms to capture data specific to your situation. For example, an engineering company that makes turbine engines may have a project to develop a new engine. Tasks that must be accomplished include building components for the engine. A company using @task can build forms to record data such a tolerances or metallic composition of specific parts.
Another company might be creating a certification test. Tasks for this project include writing and evaluating questions for the test. Custom forms could include areas for recording the type of question. The percentage of people who missed a question on an evaluation exam could be useful.
When you build custom forms, you use parameters, parameter groups, and categories. A category is the entire form, a parameter group is a group of related parameters, and a parameter is a single field. For example, when you create a project, you set the help desk attributes using a form shown in Figure 10.1.
Using this form as example of how categories, parameter groups and parameters are related is very instructional. In this example the entire form would be the Queue Properties category. The Queue Properties category contains four parameter groups: Publish as Help Desk, Queue Properties, New Issue Fields, and Email Settings. Each of the parameter groups in turn are populated by individual parameters such as the Type of Issues. Thus, when you build categories, you create parameters, group the parameters into parameter groups, and then place either individual parameters or parameter groups into categories.
