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Bentley Infrastructure Cloud IDEAS Portal - New
Status Needs review/ Under Consideration
Product Areas Forms
Created by Guest
Created on May 25, 2026

Feature Request: Display User-Friendly Column Labels Instead of Technical Bindings

I would like to submit a feature request to significantly improve the usability of our forms, both for field and office staff.

The Problem:
Currently, the data grid on our forms displays the technical "binding name" in the column headers. For technical reasons related to our PDF exports, these binding names must be unique (e.g.,
equipment_1, equipment_2, equipment_3), even when the user-facing label for all of them should simply be "Equipment."

This creates two major issues:

  1. Confusion for Users: For technicians in the field trying to filter data or managers in the office trying to review it, the technical binding names are confusing and unintuitive. They don't know what equipment_1 represents without further investigation.

  2. Inefficiency: This confusion slows down data review and increases the risk of errors when filtering or analyzing the information.

Besides that:

Considering we´ve been working already the previous visualization of the bidings, where it was displayed the text and not the biding name, we have hundreds of forms created and biding that are used already. IF I go there and change the biding to the name as Bentley is suggesting, all the previous information there will be lost.

That´s not all, there is an existing norm created by NBS where it says how the parameters should be named and we are currently NOT following this rules with this update that was done by Bentley. Please see photo attached.

The Suggestion:
My proposal is to change the display logic of the form's data grid.

  • Display the user-facing "Name Text" (the label) in the column header. This is the human-readable name that users expect to see.

  • Retain the unique "Binding Name" for all backend processes, especially for mapping the data correctly to the exported PDF.

This approach separates the user interface (what the user sees) from the data layer (what the system uses), which is a standard practice in software design.

Addressing a Potential Obstacle:
One might suggest simply renaming our bindings to be more descriptive. However, we have been developing forms since 2024, and we have a vast library of existing forms and associated PDFs. Manually updating every single form and PDF binding would be an enormous and impractical amount of work.

The Benefit:
This feature would provide an immediate and significant improvement in usability and efficiency for all users, without requiring a massive rework of our existing content.

Thank you for considering this crucial enhancement.


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