A dynamic field is a special kind of field in OTRS, created to extend the information stored on a ticket or article. These fields are not fixed in the system and they can appear only in specific screens, they can be mandatory or not, and their representation in the screens depends on the field type defined at their creation time according to the data to be held by the field. For example, there are fields to hold a text, a date, a selection of items, etc.

Dynamic fields are the evolution of TicketFreeText TicketFreeKey TicketFreeTime, ArticleFreeText and ArticleFreeKey fields that where commonly used in OTRS 3.0 and before. The limitation of these "Free Fields" was that they can be defined up to 16 (text or dropdown) fields and 6 time fields for a ticket and 3 (text or dropdown) fields for each article only, not more.

Now with dynamic fields the limitation in the number of fields per ticket or article is removed, you can create as many dynamic fields you like either for ticket or articles. And beyond that, the framework behind the dynamic fields is prepared to handle custom fields for other objects rather than just ticket and articles.

This new framework that handles the dynamic fields is build using a modular approach, where each kind of dynamic field can be seen as a plug-in module for the framework. This means that the variety of dynamic fields can be easily extended by public OTRS modules, OTRS Feature Add-ons, OTRS custom developments, and other custom developments.

The following dynamic field types are included with this release: