For information about creating custom fields, see:
The following table details the types of custom fields you can add.
Types | Description |
---|---|
Drop-down list | This field enables you to create a list of options for users to select. Each option is a combination of a title and a tag. The title is displayed to users and the tag is used as a ticket property that you can use in business rules. You can create up to 2,000 values in custom drop-down menu.
You can select which field appears as the default option in the drop-down list using or choose to not display a field value as a default.
Note: When you configure a default option in a drop-down list, this only applies to new tickets. If you change an existing ticket form to one that contains a drop-down list with a default option, the default option is not displayed and is shown as blank.
You can organize drop-down list options into categories (see Organizing drop-down and multi-select list options). |
Multi-select | This field enables users to choose multiple options from a predetermined list. You can create up to 2,000 values in custom multi-select list.
You can organize options into categories (see Organizing drop-down and multi-select list options). ![]() |
Text | This is a simple single line text input.
|
Multi-line text | This is a multiple line text input.
|
Numeric | This is for simple numeric input (no decimals). Values entered in custom numeric fields for organizations can't exceed 12 digits. There are no restrictions on the length of values in custom numeric fields for tickets or users.
|
Decimal | This is for numbers that contain decimals.
|
Checkbox | This is used to capture a Yes/No value. Enter a tag to be added to the ticket when the checkbox is selected. Use the tag to filter your views, triggers and automations.
|
Date | Custom date fields allow your users to select a date from a date picker. Users can choose the current date or any date in the past or future.
Community tip! Colin shows how to use custom date fields to set reminders for on-hold tickets. Check it out in our community forums. |
Credit card number | This field allows users to enter a credit card number in a secure, PCI compliant manner. Only the last four digits are visible to agents and stored by Zendesk.
|
Regex | You can enter a Ruby regular expression to create an input mask to validate proper entry of numbers in fixed patterns (telephone numbers, zip codes, social security numbers, etc).
Here's a regular expression for a U.S. social security number. This expression requires three sets of numbers (0-9 only) in a pattern of 3-2-4 and each separated by a dash \b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}\b Other common regular expressions include:
For more information about Ruby regular expressions, see Rubular. |
59 Comments
Hi Jessie, thanks for getting back to me.
I was asking specifically about the multi-line text field.
I expect someone over there to know how much text is allowed :)
Hey David!
I did a little digging on this (it's been a looong time since I've gotten this question), and it looks like the limit on the multi-text field is about 60,000 characters. So unless you're going to be writing a short novel, you should be fine. :)
ETA: Bear in mind that approaching this limit will start to impact your Zendesk's performance, so I recommend that you avoid doing so.
Hi, is there a way to create a ticket field in "Time" or "Date-Time" type?
Hi Valerie!
While you can create date fields, time based fields are not yet supported (you can use free text as a workaround.)
You can create a post on our product feedback forum with your use case and this might get implemented in the future!
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Product-feedback
Is it possible to have a date field automatically populated based on another date field? For some of our tickets, we need to complete two dates Date A and Date B. Date B is always one week before Date A, so if we could cut out having to select the second date that would be helpful!
Hey Amanda,
Unfortunately you would not be able to utilize a trigger to set the date field based on another date field.
One solution would be to use a web hook in your triggers and notify an external service that would then update that field value. Some documentation on web hooks can be found here .
You would be able to send the ticket field data in Date Field A then run some logic and make an API call to update Date Field B. Otherwise, the Apps framework may be another good avenue to extend this functionality.
What is the usefulness of credit card numbers that are not stored? How are these used?
Hey Andrew,
A field cannot be PCI compliant if shows the entire number. It is a huge security risk to have the entire CC number available for anyone that can log into the account. If you did want to store CC numbers you can use a numeric field instead.
Has anybody had trouble with using regex for a field? We would like to have a phone number field, so I used the regex ^[(](\d{3})[)][ ]?(\d{3})[-](\d{4})\s*$, which allows (xxx)xxx-xxxx or (xxx) xxx-xxxx. The regex works in rubular, and works in the Preview when setting the ticket field. But when I test it in the ticket form, there is no validation; I can type any character in the field. When I inspect the field HTML, I don't see any validation:
Hi Karen!
This is quite a conundrum. I just wanted to post to let you know that I am creating a ticket for this request. You'll hear from me via email shortly!
Are numeric fields really restricted to 12 digits max as this article says? I've been testing some custom numeric fields with larger numbers the data seems to have been stored properly, as far as I can tell. Is this restriction only when customers enter info in a relevant field on the form, or am I missing something?
Hey Dustin,
After doing some testing as both an end-user and agent on the account it doesn't look like theres a 12 digit limit any longer for custom numeric fields. I've tested well over this limit without any issue. I'll reach out to our documentation team here to see if we can get that information updated in this article.
Thanks for letting us know!
The Regular expression example.
Here's a regular expression for a U.S. social security number: \b[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{4}\b.
Is different to the example shown in the screen shot showing the product ID which causes confusion. Was a while before I noticed when trying to figure out how to use this field type.
Thanks
Andrew
Thanks for pointing that out, Andrew. We'll have the documentation team take a look.
Hi Andrew, many thanks for this great feedback. I've replaced the screenshot with an example of the SSN format. I hope this makes this clearer and thanks again!
According to the table, we were expecting the Decimal field to support only numbers and decimal points
This is for numbers that contain decimals.
However we've noticed recently that comma's are also accepted and causes us a bit of hassle when exporting this field. Has this always been the case? What was the rationale behind the comma logic despite the guidelines above?
The only other reference to this is an article (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000183407) discussing how this interacts with Zendesk built-in reporting.
Hi Panayiotis,
Comma usage as a decimal separator is common within European countries so we allow both to be used in a decimal field.
Unfortunately there's no way to toggle this off but I do hope this clears up any confusion.
Cheers!
Hi,
It would be valuable if there was an option to set a trigger with comment text "contain/do not contain this RegEx variable"
Thanks
Hi Matus -
Our product managers don't follow every article in the knowledge base, but they are subscribed to the product feedback topics. I encourage you to post any feedback or suggestions you have for them in the (Feedback on Support)[https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066] topic in the community. Here's information on (how to write an effective feedback post)[]
Would you guys ever add an attachment field?
Hey Dan! In the web form presented to your users on the help center and in the widget, there's a system field that allows users to add attachments, but you do have to enable it: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204265396-Enabling-attachments-in-tickets. Hope that helps!
How can I either create a custom user field format that is a hyperlink (to a web address), or how can I use on of the exiting fields to create a clickable web link?
Hi Bill! It looks like multi-line text fields will make custom user fields hyperlinks, 45s video demonstrating: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12a0_MQgtD_GNg_YQpBBydhRSh3Ql_yTX/view?usp=drivesdk
We do the same thing with organization fields in our production tenant and it's worked great for us so far. However, last I checked it doesn't work on ticket fields =\
I want to use a checkbox to have a user agree to a disclaimer. So the text of the disclaimer is in the description field, but there seems to no control over the formatting of that text, all line returns are stripped, so no way to separate text into paragraphs. I tried using HTML, but the field appears to only support plain text.
Is there a way to control the formatting?
When using the multi-select field on an external facing form, why is it not searchable like it is in the agent view? i.e. i can type ahead in a dropdown or multi-select as an agent, but not as an end-user while submitting a request.
Hi Nicole,
This is an excellent question. Originally when the customer portal was created, there were some use cases and functionality that was not accounted for. That being said, I'd like to flag this conversation as product feedback so that it can be reviewed by the correct team because I agree that there is definitely value to what you are saying here.
If you'd like to also make a post in our product feedback forum, that would let other users add onto your feedback and upvote it. That forum is more closely monitored by our product team as well.
Thanks again for taking the time to raise this issue.
I wrote a regular expression that works in the preview mode. When added to a custom form, the validation does not occur. Anything can be typed into the field, and it will accept it. Are there any other settings that need to be changed to enable the field to use the regular expression as validation when creating the ticket?
How did you preview it? And could you share the code and Regex you've created?
I just wanted to echo some requests here that it would be desirable to be able to edit free-form text custom fields with macros. This would be useful for us because we are using a custom field to keep track of JIRA ID's and we'd like to use the same macro for every ticket that corresponds to a currently high-frequency issue tracked by jira.
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