Soft-coded lookups
A lookup is one of the dropdown lists in SteadyOn — Hazard status, Incident type, Action priority, and dozens more. They’re “soft-coded” because they live in your organisation’s data, not in the application’s code. You can edit any of them.
Why soft-code them
Section titled “Why soft-code them”Hard-coded dropdowns sound easier — the app ships with the right values, you don’t have to think about it, and developers don’t have to write a UI to edit them. But they break in three ways:
- Terminology varies. A NZ org might call a particular value Hazard; an AU org might call the same thing WHS Hazard; a UK org H&S Risk. Hard-coded forces one term on everyone.
- Industries vary. A construction site uses Permit-to-work as an action type. An office never does. Hard-coded forces irrelevant options on people who’ll never use them.
- Workflows change. When your org introduces a new status (e.g. Resolved) you don’t want to wait for an app update; you want to add it now.
Soft-coded fixes all three. Each org has its own copy of the lookups, edit-anywhere, retire-when-needed.
What you can do
Section titled “What you can do”For each value in each lookup domain:
- Rename — change the label.
- Recolour — change the chip colour.
- Reorder — drag to a new position. Order in the dropdown matches order in the list.
- Retire — hide from new records but keep on old ones. The list still renders the value if anything currently uses it.
- Add new — extend the list.
A retired value behaves like a closed door: existing records that use it still show it; new records can’t pick it.
How BRAG interacts
Section titled “How BRAG interacts”Some lookup domains carry a bragLevel per value. For status
lookups, this lets you say “the Resolved status counts as Blue
(closed)” — so SteadyOn’s BRAG calculator treats it correctly.
If you add a custom Cancelled status to incidents and want it to go blue, set its bragLevel to Blue. SteadyOn’s BRAG rules pick it up automatically.
What you shouldn’t customise away
Section titled “What you shouldn’t customise away”A few constraints to be aware of:
- Likelihood and severity are the rows and columns of the risk matrix. Renaming them is fine (“Almost certain” → “Frequent” is cosmetic). Removing them changes the matrix shape, which may break existing assessments.
- Notifiable type has a specific behavioural meaning — it triggers the “regulator must be notified” flag. Don’t retire it unless your jurisdiction has changed.
- Closed-equivalent statuses are what BRAG uses to decide “blue”. If you retire all closed-equivalents, every record will look unfinished.
Where to edit them
Section titled “Where to edit them”Organisation Settings → Configuration → Lookups.
Every domain is listed in the left rail. Click one to edit its values inline.