The "Address" section`s fields customization in Bitrix24 and own drop-down lists

It is completely unnecessary to talk about the importance of information about the address of your customers for CRM — it is needed by everyone and always. Bitrix24 allows you to determine the address as accurately as possible: from the country and region to the house, apartment or office number. The system integrated with the Google map, after the necessary settings, will easily show you the place on the map and a lot of other useful information: we talked about this in detail in the article "How a module for Bitrix24 from Avivi will help work with Google Maps to determine locations ". But by default, the "Address" section in the CRM entities is trivially simple and clumsy — it's just a set of standard fields, each of which can have only one value. The company employee must simply enter the information manually, or this process can be automatic, but there is no option to choose from a ready-made list. But if Aviva's clients need it, our developers can develop such a solution.

Prerequisites for creating custom fields

The "Address" section is present in several entities of the Bitrix24 CMS: in Leads, Contacts and Companies. Until 2020, address information was part of company details, but then this section became completely independent for all entities. If necessary, users of all versions of Bitrix24 can add custom fields needed for work to the address (as well as to most other entities and sections). However, users' capabilities are quite limited and complex operations require the help of qualified specialists.

Avivi's clients needed a special look for the "Address" section, with the ability to choose options from a ready-made list. This is due to the specifics of the business, which extends to specific countries with an established territorial and administrative division. The on-premise version of Bitrix24, which allows you to create new solutions and implement them into the system with a change of interface, provided the realization of the need for life. The Bitrix24 virtual service does not allow you to perform such tasks.

The main requirements were:

●     Selecting a country from the list;

●     Select province/state;

●     Choice of city.

Further data entry is done manually, that is, the street, house and the rest did not need to be selected from the list. Control of sequential address recording must also take place: without entering the necessary data, it is impossible to save changes in the entity card.

How the Avivi solution works

Bitrix24 is an extremely flexible system: the authors have foreseen the need of almost every business to configure the system exactly as they need. That is why the addition of custom fields helps to solve many tasks faced by developers. First of all, the Avivi team created three additional tables in the Bitrix24 highload blocks of our customers. Accordingly, information about countries, regions and cities is stored here. It should be noted that if necessary, our clients can independently edit these tables: add new records if the business expands, or remove those that are not being served. This can be done both from the admin panel and directly from Bitrix24 if you fill in the appropriate field instead of selecting an option from the list. All three tables are related to each other, which gives the system an understanding of what values to substitute in the drop-down lists of custom fields.

If necessary, you can add other addresses to the card, also through custom selectable fields. At least one address must contain all the necessary data (marked in red), otherwise the system will not allow you to save the changes and will necessarily indicate the missing places. You can also determine which fields are mandatory in the on-premise Bitrix24 admin panel.

Filling in the fields in the Bitrix24 entity card is consistent and takes many times less time than if employees were to enter it manually and eliminates errors due to human inattention. If the user changes his choice in the upper field (for example, "Country"), the fields filled below from the drop-down lists ("Region" and "City") will be automatically cleared and will need to be filled in again.

The implementation of the solution required not only the modernization of Bitrix24's on-premise work methods, but also part of the interaction with the user. Therefore, new JS scripts were written to perform the task, as well as stylization of new elements to the standard look of the system with CSS styles. It is nice to note that the solution from Avivi will remain with customers forever, because it is protected from updates of the on-premise version.

As you can see, the customization of the "Address" section fully satisfied the needs of Aviva's customers and their expectations from the work performed and the selected business software. Our team will be happy to help you implement any Bitrix24 improvement and development project.