These terms are used widely throughout the administration guide.
Fixed names are defined as terms that are used within the ExtraView database to refer to a field or object. Once created, names for an object do not change and they are a fixed reference. Each name will have a corresponding screen title. If you have turned on the localization feature of ExtraView, there may be more than one title for any named object, i.e. there may be one title for each locale or language. Screen titles for any fixed name may be changed by the administrator.
The screen title is defined as the reference to an object by which it is referred to throughout the user interface to the end user of ExtraView. Thus, every title within ExtraView may be altered, but the underlying name that it refers to will not alter.
In this way, the title (or label) that refers to each field and object can be changed at will by the administrator, but the underlying data remains without change. For example, the field with the name of ID may have its title changed from Defect #, to Tracking Number. From the moment of this change, all screens, reports and other screens that refer to ID will use the new title.
Changes made in this way to metadata by administrators are logged by ExtraView, giving an audit trail of who made what change, and when they made it.
Fixed names used for any object type are unique within ExtraView Names can only consist of the characters A to Z, 0 to 9, and ‘_’. The first character of a fixed name must be alphabetic and the name can be up to 30 characters in length. Names cannot contain characters from non-English alphabets. Further restrictions are that you may not have two underscore characters together in a name and the last character may not be an underscore.
Screen titles are not required to be unique for an object type across an ExtraView installation. However, consideration should be given to using non-unique titles. In some installations, this makes perfect sense, in others it may not. Titles can consist of most characters, but “special” characters such as ‘!’, ‘"’, ‘#’, ‘$’, ‘%’, ‘&’, ‘’', ‘(‘, ‘)’ ‘@’, ‘~’, ‘:’, ‘;’ and ‘`’ may not work in all places. For reliability, you should use alphabetic characters only in titles. However, titles can be localized and may contain characters from any alphabet, including double-byte character set alphabets.
With a small number of exceptions, you may not insert HTML into a screen title. This is to preserve security where a user may have the ability to alter a title and uses this ability to inject HTML that consists of a script into a screen. Such scripts may not be innocuous and therefore the ability to introduce HTML of any type into a title is restricted.
Note that if you take advantage of this feature, then any output through the API or CLI will contain and display the embedded HTML within the screen title.
