#happy2022workday day-036

Happy 2022 day-036! Today’s update…

Today we talk about Calculated Fields Naming Conventions (CFNC).

First, the picture shows several #Workday calculated fields we have yet to cover in these #CFs4all posts. As we prepare for the 3/3 Reporting Share-a-thon we will sometimes return back to the topic of CFs. But, soon the rest of the month of February #happy2022workday posts will be focused on reporting instead of CFs.

For those new to Calculated Fields (CF) and in particular coming up with your best CFNC for your team, be aware that this important topic isn’t a favorite for those still learning CFs themselves. But, let’s make it the focus sooner than later, and please help save the newer customers from your pain by helping spread the word — “Having a CFNC is important”, and only a handful of us sharing fans are willing to jump up and down on our soap boxes.

If you or others in your network have been live for more than a year or two, this probably sounds familiar…

There isn’t consistency in the naming of CFs. This plays a large role in making it difficult to determine if a CF already exists. This leads to people simply creating new ones because it takes too long to determine if the desired CF already exists. Before you know it, thousands of CFs have been created (this is not an exaggeration) with various conventions: some with initials of the creator at the front or at the end, maybe an “int” to specify use in integrations, inconsistent abbreviations for “Lookup Value as of Date” (or using TF for True/False Condition instead of TFC, even if TF is somebody’s initials, or EE which also means “employee” instead of EVX for Evaluate Expression), almost all CFs starting with “CF” and other more recent ones start with “zCF”. This final one may be mostly my fault, as I owned the Calculated Field training while at Workday for a few years, and I taught Workday to over 1,000 customers. But, I hadn’t yet left Workday and worked directly with live customers in their tenants. I had no idea how difficult it was to scroll through hundreds if not thousands of CFs that start with “CF” and thus alphabetically came right before the fields I was looking, such as those I was guessing started with “cost” as in “cost center”.

At this point, with thousands of live Workday customers, there isn’t one CFNC that works for all. Particularly for many of you it’s too late to have one consistent CFNC because you simply have too many CFs (and at this time we can load CFs so we cannot change their names unless we do that manually.)

For those who like my 3-letter abbreviation approach for CF functions, see the comments for my list. It mostly follows a “skip vowels after the first letter of the first word if the function has only 2 words in it” approach. This list was originally posted over 5 years ago, and recently re-posted on Community a couple of years ago, here.

p.s. I checked today’s 2022R1 Sandbox Preview. Nothing new added.