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Item properties and custom properties

Every item carries properties: standard ones the platform maintains — creator, dates, version, approval state — and custom ones your repository defines for its own data. Both appear on the item's Item Properties tab.

Overview​

Open an item and select its Item Properties tab to see a collapsible list of its standard properties and, when the repository defines them, its custom properties. For folders, selected properties also appear as columns of the Contains table. Which properties show in each place is a repository setting.

Standard properties are set by the platform at milestones — creation, check-out, check-in, approval — and are read-only on the tab. Examples: Creator, Create Date, Modified By, Modify Date, Version, Approved, Approval State, Size.

Custom properties hold information not predefined in the product — a cost center, a system ID, a classification, even a relationship to other objects. You edit their values directly on the Item Properties tab of any object they apply to, and a property can be set to appear (and even be required) when an item is checked in. A repository administrator defines custom properties: their type, which object types or diagram elements they're available on, and their visibility.

Custom properties exist at three levels:

  • Repository objects — defined repository-wide, valued per object on its Item Properties tab.
  • Diagram elements — defined repository-wide, valued per shape in a diagram.
  • Diagram-defined — defined inside one diagram for its own shapes; see Diagram Defined Custom Properties.

Custom property values are queryable: reports address them through the property name in the iGrafx Query Language (IQL), and process metrics can roll shape values up a diagram.

Related tasks & references​