[Catalog] Ability to reorder User Defined Fields

[rmartini]

Problem statement:

As a Catalog (or subcatalog) admin, we have the ability to add custom User Defined Fields when learners register for courses. These fields help with analyzing data that's needed by our institution. As programs expand and new needs are identified, we need the ability to reorder these fields. Currently we can only add new fields, edit settings of existing fields, or delete existing fields but cannot adjust the order.

To describe a specific use case, we need to know the state and/or country of people who paid for courses. Users initially registered with the default field of "address" but many users didn't include the state/country information. We have now added additional required fields to gather this data. However, these fields now appear "out of order" with address appearing as the 5th item and city, state, and country appearing at the end of the list:

• phone_number
• industry
• industry_years
• title
• address
• highest_degree
• university
• social_media_links
• gender
• birthdate
• referral
• employer
• city
• state
• country

Currently, the only way we can get the order of these items to appear as address, city, state, country, followed by the other fields is to delete the existing fields and rebuild them.

Proposed solution:

Allow admins to have the ability to reorder all user defined fields. Ideally, I would like this to be available directly in the Catalog admin interface without doing things in the API. We have subacatalog admins who manage their own custom fields and may not have the skills needed to change things in the API.

User role(s):

admin

[KataKeri]

hi @rmartini 

Do you mean reorder UDF columns in Analytics? 

[rmartini]

Hi @KataKeri ! 

No, I wasn't referring to the analytics portion. I was mainly referring to the User Defined Fields tab within the Catalog admin settings. I think I'd prefer the Analytics view continue to reflect the order we have on the User Defined Fields tab. I'm going to include 3 screenshots. In the first image, I have 4 fields highlighted (address, city, state, and country). Those 4 fields logically go together to provide a full address and we'd like these to remain grouped together. For example, if we want to reorder how these fields are presented to new learners, in other words having those be the first 4 fields presented to learners when they sign up for a course, we basically aren't able to. The only option we could figure out was to delete the original fields and create new ones. And to get those 4 fields at the top of the list, we'd have to delete every field so it pushes those 4 to the top. Ideally, we'd like a way to reorder things (like a drag and drop, or arrow up and down; the second image is a mock up with the drag icon found elsewhere in Canvas). And the third image is how the fields are currently presented to new learners.

For some additional context, we found that users weren't entering their full address in the "address" field. They'd type "123 Green Street" instead of "123 Green St., Chicago, IL, USA". Our university needs to know what countries (and ideally what state) learners are coming from. With separate fields, it's much easier to sort/filter that info in a CSV so that's why we wanted to add the additional fields. But, it looked very out of place to be first asked for the address and then, 11 fields later, be asked to enter the city, state, and country. 

Let me know if I could clarify anything further!Screenshot of current User Defined Field tabMock up of User Defined Fields tab with drag and drop icons to reorder fieldsScreenshot of the Create an Account page as presented to the learner; this is what we'd like to reorder

[KataKeri]

@rmartini Thank you so much for the details! All clear now.