View source for Custom Field Collections for All Entities

== Introduction ==


Custom Field collections support was only available for Product and User entities in AC7 and AC Gold. However for AbleCommerce Gold R12 the support level is extended and now this is available for all persist-able Entities. 

NOTE: For Products we can still use the Product.CustomFields property to access the custom fields collection, also for Users the User.Settings collection is still available. However for all entities including the Product and User entities a new collection property "ExtendedFields" is added in AbleCommerce Gold R12.

== API Changes and Details == 

There are no database changes for this feature and it is a API only change. Also there is no front end/UI changes related to this feature. Basically it just makes it easy to associate some custom data to any entity quickly. For example in case if you want to pass some custom information along order then this can be done like this.

<source lang="csharp">
order.ExtendedFields["SPECIAL_LABEL"] = "This is a special order!";
order.Save(false, false);
</source>

Now this custom field can be accessed like this 

<source lang="csharp">
string specialLabel = order.ExtendedFields["SPECIAL_LABEL"];
</source>

if you want to remove this field then you have to do 

<source lang="csharp">
order.ExtendedFields.Remove("SPECIAL_LABEL");
order.Save(false, false);
</source>

If you want to remove all fields associated with an order then you will have to

<source lang="csharp">
order.ExtendedFields.Clear();
order.Save(false, false);
</source>

As mentioned above that the ExtendedFields collection property is available for all persist-able entities and can be used same way as explained above.