- 18 Jul 2025
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Safe / Unsafe
- Updated 18 Jul 2025
- 1 minute read
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The Safe / Unsafe setting for a custom Person-scoped field determines how the field can be updated if an application in an active period exists for a given Person record.
If a custom Person-scoped field is configured as Safe, the field value is not updated by a safe source import or a safe form submission if the record has an application in an active period.
Important
Standard Person-scoped fields, such as First Name, Last Name, and Date of Birth, are always treated as unsafe.
Because of this, applicant information stored in standard Person-scoped fields will be updated even if an import or form is set to Safe.
You can override the safe field behavior in the following ways:
Setting | Behavior |
---|---|
Unsafe set on field | Always treats the field as Unsafe, regardless of the settings on the import or the form. |
Unsafe set on form or Unsafe set on import | Treats all mapped fields as Unsafe, regardless of the individual field settings. |
Unsafe set on specific field destination | Treats a specific mapped field as Unsafe, even if the form or import and the field are set as Safe. |
By default, all forms (that are not Application, Application Creation, or Reader-scoped) and custom fields that are not Application-scoped are treated as Safe, unless one of the three methods above is used to override this setting.
For data imports, any data mapped to Application-scoped fields is always treated as Unsafe, and is always imported, regardless of the Safe or Unsafe setting on the import.
Devices and relationship-scoped fields are safe.
Tests and school-scoped fields are unsafe.
In most cases, custom fields should be configured as Safe. Remember, it is possible to override a field’s Safe setting when configuring a form, a source import, or even a specific mapped field destination.
There is no way to override the behavior of a field configured Unsafe (that is, an Unsafe field is always updated regardless of the conditions set on a form or import). Only set a field to be Unsafe if under every circumstance, the data in that field should be updated by a form submission or a source import (such as an SIS ID field).
Example Safe Fields Timeline
The following example describes the timeline for a Hispanic field that is configured as Safe: