Fields

AlphOne ships with very little on a contact: a name, and the channels the person reaches you on. Everything else is yours to add. The Fields entry in the menu lets you create the fields your business actually uses, on a running AlphOne, without a restart or a new version.

Add a field

Open Fields and fill in three things.

Label is the text people see on screen, such as Birth date. Change it whenever you like.

Name is what the API calls the field, such as birthDate. It starts with a lowercase letter and holds only letters and digits. Pick it carefully, because it cannot be changed later.

Kind says what the field holds. Six kinds are available.

Kind	Holds
Text	A short line, such as a job title
Long text	Several lines, such as a note
Number	A whole number, such as loyalty points
Yes or no	A checkbox
Date	A calendar day, written as 1990-04-17
Choice	A short line, kept apart from Text so a later release can add a fixed option list

Save, and the field exists. Open any contact and it is there, waiting to be filled in.

Fill a field in

Open a contact. Below the tasks you will find a Fields section with one input per field you created. Type, then press Save fields.

A field you never fill in stays empty. AlphOne stores nothing for it and it costs nothing.

Fill a field from a spreadsheet

You do not have to type every value in by hand. When you import a CSV or an Excel file, your fields sit in the mapping dropdown beside Name, Email and Phone. Point a column at one and the values arrive with the contacts.

The kind is checked before anything is stored. A row whose cell does not fit its field fails, the reason names the field and its kind, and no contact is created for that row. Fix the spreadsheet and import it again.

An empty cell stores nothing. The contact is created and the field stays waiting, exactly as if you had never touched it.

One thing an import will not do is change a contact you already have. A row matching an existing contact is skipped, and its fields are left alone. That keeps an import from quietly overwriting work.

The kind is checked when you save

AlphOne refuses a value that does not match the kind. A Date field will not accept not a date, and a Number field will not accept 4.5, because whole numbers are what it holds. You see the reason on screen and nothing is stored.

This is why the kind cannot be changed after a field exists. Changing it would leave old values that no longer fit.

Archive a field you no longer need

Press Archive beside a field. It disappears from the contact screen and from the API straight away.

Archiving does not delete anything. The values stay in the database. If you create the field again later, with the same name and the same kind, the old values come back.

Using your fields from the API

A field you create becomes a real field on Contact in the GraphQL API, under the name you chose. So after adding birthDate you can ask for it directly:

query {
  contact(id: "0198c000-0000-7000-8000-000000000401") {
    name
    birthDate
  }
}

No rebuild, no code change. The field appears in schema introspection too, so API tools and AI agents discover it on their own.

Writing values goes through one mutation:

mutation {
  writeContactFields(
    contactId: "0198c000-0000-7000-8000-000000000401"
    values: { birthDate: "1990-04-17" }
  )
}

Send only the fields you want to change. A field you leave out keeps the value it already holds, a field you send replaces it, and a field you send as null is cleared.

A Number field holds a whole number between -2147483648 and 2147483647. Anything outside that is refused, because the API answers it as an Int.

What stays fixed

A contact’s name is not a field you can archive or rename away. It is what AlphOne shows in lists, in tasks, and in search results, so it always exists.

Channels stay separate too. A phone number or an email address is an identity, not a field, because AlphOne uses those to spot duplicate contacts. See Contacts for how that works.