Read time: 5 minutes

Hey, there! Mia here. Last week, we made an honest case for custom objects.

Are they always the cleanest, most cutting edge way to capture non-delivered data within your Workday tenant? No. But can they get the job done fairly well for no extra cost? Absolutely!

If you missed last week’s strategy sesh, we highly recommend you check it out here before reading today’s newsletter.

Today, we’re sharing more on the mechanics of custom objects—a step-by-step on initial configuration.

So, grab your coffee, tea, lunch, or snack (depending on where you are in the world 😆), and let’s dive into today’s technical guide…

If you’ve never built custom objects yourself, the following walkthrough should give you a solid understanding of setup.

Today, we’ll create a non-effective dated custom object that lives on the Job Profile business object (BO). The goal is to capture two additional categorizations that aren’t WD-delivered:

Let’s do it! 💃🏻

Run the Create Custom Object task, and click into the Workday Object input. Click Non-Effective Dated, and select the Workday Object you’d like to extend with a custom object—in this case, we’re choosing Job Profile.

If you want more on non-effective dated versus effective-dated custom objects, check out last week’s newsletter. And note, initial setup looks the same for both non-effective and effective dated custom objects—so you can use this example to guide you in either case (because who doesn’t love a good two-for-one deal? 😜).

Next, give your custom object a name. Ours is “Job Profile Tags”. Press OK to proceed.

On the next page, within the General Settings tab, confirm your custom object’s name.

And at this stage, you have another decision to make: will you allow multiple instances on this object?

If the object should support more than one entry at a time, check this box.

In our use case, leave it unchecked, as in, “No”—we don’t want a job profile to have more than one “Job Profile Tags” entry at any given time. Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean the fields on the custom object can’t have multiple selections. It just means there won’t be more than one instance of the overarching “Job Profile Tags” object per Job Profile.

Next, navigate to the Field Definitions tab and click “Add” to set up a field.

In the Field Label input, give your field a name. Our first field is “High Market Visibility”. Then, select your Field Type. We’re choosing to set this field up as a simple and straightforward “Boolean” (a true/false checkbox).

There are 9 Field Types you can choose from:

As you create your Fields and select a Field Type, you can either choose a standard type from the dropdown or run the Create Custom Field Type task to define your own.

Click the checkbox in the upper righthand corner of the field UI to save the field. Then, click the “Add” button to add your next field. You can leave Validations and Display order blank for now—we’ll come back to these (trust the process 🤭).

Our next field is “Internal Career Track Options”, set up as a “List”. To select a list as your Field Type, you must first create a custom list (or select an existing one). To do this…

Run the task Create Custom List. Alternatively, you can run the task Create Custom Field Type mentioned previously, and select “List”. The former is just a more direct route (we always opt for the scenic route except when configuring in Workday 😆).

On the “List Values” tab, add and order the values you’d like to include as selection options on your list. Click OK, then navigate back to the Create Custom Object page, and add your list in the Field Type input (find and select it manually in the dropdown—it usually won’t show up with a text search. Sigh 😮‍💨).

Now, let’s discuss Validations. The Validations input changes based on the Field Type you select. You can use it to require the field upon data entry (giving it that notorious *red asterisk).

Instance Reference and List field types include two additional options under Validations: Multi-instance and Single-instance. These options control how many items can be selected for the field (multiple, or just one, respectively).

⛔️ Be careful here! The Validations setting cannot be changed once you activate your custom object.

In the Validations input for Internal Career Track, select “Multi-instance”. This ensures that multiple tracks can be selected from the list. Some job profiles may have multiple career track options (next week, we’ll explore how you can limit the selection to two tracks, maximum 😉).

The final setting on the Field Definitions tab we’ll cover today is Display Order. This is the order in which your fields appear under the custom object. Similar to how business process steps are ordered, use letters to order your fields:

Next, click on the Permissions tab. Here, select the domain(s) to secure your custom object. You can select a delivered domain and/or a Custom Domain (Workday provides 200 custom domains that you can tie to custom objects).

Let’s say we want to secure the Job Profile Tags custom object like any other object on Job Profile. We can utilize the delivered domain, “Job Profile: Manage Job Profile Events”. The permissions on this domain then applies to the Job Profile Tags custom object as well:

As you determine how to secure your custom object, consider questions like…

You can achieve a custom security setup for your custom object with a combination of a Custom Domain and/or a new security group.

Finally, review your settings on the Summary tab. If everything looks good, click OK.

On the next page, activate your custom object. Choose a Display Value and Reference ID (both come from one of the fields you set up on the custom object).

Display Value is the field that represents the custom object on the front-end. For example, for the WD-delivered Worker BO, the Display Value is the Worker instance.

Reference ID is the field that represents the custom object on the back-end (within EIBs, for example).

In our example, we set the Internal Career Track field as the Display Value and Reference ID for the Job Profile Tags BO.

You can also choose to Hide on View when Unpopulated if you’d like. This means the custom object stays hidden on the delivered object it extends if no data is entered.

Lastly, you can optionally add Help Text that appears when the custom object data is edited.

Review your settings one last time, and click OK to activate! 🎉 And go ahead—throw some confetti! You earned it 💪

If you navigate to a job profile, you now see the Job Profile Tags custom object on the Additional Data tab:

Ohhh yeah. A lot more. Like at least 2 newsletters more 😅

Now that your custom object is up and running, how do you get your custom data into Workday?

And once your custom data is in Workday, how do you view it? And how do you use it?

We’ll be answering these questions and more over the next few weeks. Stay tuned 😎

As always, thank you for being a reader!

We’re celebrating you and your pursuit of a Well Built Workday 🥳

Until next time!

Mia & Ceci

Co-Founders of Well Built Solutions

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