Options for Legacy Filters: How to contact
When setting up contact filters you have the option of using legacy fields, the 1:1 fields that come with PowerSchool and old custom fields, or you can use the new contacts module. When using legacy fields for contacts there are certain stock fields included. You may omit any here and they will not be used in exports or current selections.
Why enable/disable legacy phone/emails?
In the past we made custom plugins for every single PowerSchool customer. A couple years ago we added stock versions of the legacy queries so that schools who just wanted to use the stock fields could. But many schools wanted to use stock fields but only some of them and those schools still needed custom plugins. As we try to make more and more options available for you to change without needing us (though we will help you if you'd prefer) we've added the ability for you to include or exclude on a field by field level each of the stock phone/email fields. This allows us to set you up initially in a very generic fashion and you can choose to include or exclude a phone field anytime you want without needing to change your exports or needing a custom plugin update.
What happens when a field is marked Disabled from Exports?
The default setup will include all the fields shown when using the legacy method. However when a field is disabled PowerSchool will leave a blank space instead of the field value. This allows you to change later on and the field will change from blank to whatever is in that field, or from the field value to blank, depending on if you are enabling or disabling.
In the example above the school does not want to contact people at work so they exclude motherdayphone and fatherdayphone where they've stored work phone information. When the query gets to those fields it simply leaves returns blanks instead of the data and moves on.
Will my custom data plugin respect these settings?
These settings were introduced in BrightArrow Base v9.0.0. If you have a BrightArrow Data plugin you may or may not have custom queries. BrightArrow Data v9.0.0 is the first version that respects these settings. If your version is older it will not replace the field value with a blank in any custom query.
Version 9 was built very carefully to honor older data plugins. Your data plugin will continue to work as it did before and does not have to be updated right away. This allows you to update your Base plugins without needing an immediate data plugin change. When we update your data plugin we will update it to enforce these rules. Or if your data plugin was only there to make a change that can now be done with these settings we will move you to stock queries and allow you to change things using the settings alone.