Field Types

These are the types of fields you can create in Bento:

 

Field Type	Purpose
Text	Store anything you type*
Number	Store numeric data, with formatting options**
Choice	Create a pop-up menu in order to select an item from a list
Checkbox	Provide an on-off type of choice
Media	Store and use image, movie, sound, and PDF files
Simple list	Store data that’s in a variety of data types in columnar format
File list	Store and view thumbnails of aliases to files or folders that are on your computer
Message list	Display emails, notes, and RSS articles from the Mac OS X Mail application
Related data	Store one or more records from another library or collection that are related to the current record
Time	Choose and store a time of day, in hours, minutes, and seconds, AM or PM
Date	Choose and store a date and time value. Displays the date by default and can also display the time.
Duration	Store an amount of time in weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds
Calculation	Display the result of a specified calculation. Supported operators are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and concatenation (joining two or more words or sentences).
Currency	Store an amount of money and display it in the selected currency format
Automatic counter	Assign a higher number to each new record
Rating	Set the rating value of an item by clicking stars in the field
Encrypted	Protect sensitive or confidential data and hide it from view (data is displayed as bullets). Encrypted data is stored in your Bento database.
Location	Store location information (latitude and longitude) and display a map of the location in a web browser. Locations are displayed either in decimal degrees or in degrees, minutes, and seconds. Latitude values range from -90 to 90 degrees. Positive values correspond to North latitudes; negative correspond to South. Longitude values range from -180 to 180 degrees (or 0 to 360 degrees). Positive values correspond to East longitudes; negative correspond to West.
Address	Store all components of a single street address
Phone number	Store a phone number, including the area code
Email address	Store an email address
URL	Store a website, FTP site, or AFP site address***
IM account	Store an IM account and service name
	Notes: *Maximum text field size is approximately 2 GB. **The largest number supported is 263. ***The URL field does not support URL values that contain Japanese characters.

Note  The date and time formats vary depending on the current System Preferences settings. See Mac Help for information about changing the format.

For a list of field types that you can import data into, see ”Field Types Supported for Import” on page 121.

List Fields

When you create address, phone number, email address, URL, and IM account fields, Bento creates an associated list field that lets you display multiple addresses, phone numbers, and so on for one record. When you enter data in one of these single field types, Bento displays the same data in the associated list field.

For example, suppose you have a form that displays a home phone number in a phone number field named “Home Phone Number.” You add work and mobile phone numbers to two other phone number fields. Bento creates a list field and displays all three phone numbers in that list field, but the work and mobile phone numbers are not added to the “Home Phone Number” field you created.

You can import and export values stored in regular fields (for example, “Home Phone Number” in the form shown above) but you can’t import or export values stored in list fields. You can see values stored in list fields in form view but not in table view.

Home > Using Fields > About Fields > Field Types