Last date modified: 2026-May-25
Code contracts
Coding refers to capturing and storing metadata about a contract or its clauses. You can code a contract by clicking into fields, using Send to Field, or using data point suggestions.
You can create custom fields with different format options to extract a wide range of data. For example, you can extract a lease's renewal date or determine the risk level of a change-in-control provision from an employment agreement.
Supported field types:
- Fixed Length
- Long Text
- Date
- Whole Number
- Decimal
- Currency
- Yes/No
- Single Choice
- Multi Choice
- Single Object
- Multiple Object
Unsupported field types:
- File
- User
Coding by clicking into fields
In the Contracts Viewer, you can code contracts by clicking into fields. Contracts organizes fields by field type.
- For all field types populated with any value, hovering over the field will show an X button to the right of the field for clearing out the value.
- All drop-downs support dynamic searching to find choices.
- If you select a child field in a nested list, Contracts will automatically select all its parent fields as well.
For information on field types in Relativity, see Fields.
he following table describes field types and their coding behavior.
| Field | Coding limitations |
|---|---|
|
Fixed-Length Long Text |
You can configure fixed-length text fields with length up to 4,999 characters and long text fields can exceed this. The technical limitation of a long text field is 2 GB. If you try to code a text field and you exceed these limitations, you'll receive an error. |
| Date |
After you select a date using the date picker, the field displays the date in the format "March 14, 2011." When you save, Contracts stores the date in a format compatible with your server's regional settings. Confirm whether the SQL server reference applies to RelativityOne. If it is Server-only behavior, label it accordingly or remove it.
|
|
Currency Whole Number Decimal |
Enter a whole number or decimal number. |
| Yes/No | Select Yes or No from the drop-down menu. |
| Single Choice | Enter a choice, or select from the drop-down menu. The list results will update as you type. |
| Multiple Choice | Enter a choice, or select from the drop-down menu. The results will update as you type. |
Coding contracts via Send to Field
You can use the Send to Field feature to send text found in a document to a field on a layout via the context menu of the Contracts Viewer.
You can select text and populate a field. Contracts saves the location of the selected text and links it to the field, so when you click the field again, it opens to that location in the document. This is useful for QC workflows where the reviewer performing quality control can see why a coding decision was made.
Supported field types
Send to Field works for all field types that Contracts supports for coding documents.
Fields that auto-populate with selected text
For the following field types, Contracts uses the text you select with Send to Field to populate the field value and creates a link between the text in the contract and the field.
- Fixed-length text
- Long text
- Date
- Whole number
- Decimal
- Currency
Fields that require manual value selection
For the following field types, Send to Field creates a link between the text in the contract and the field, but you must manually select a value to finish coding the field.
- Single/multiple object
- Single/multiple choice
- Yes/no
Send to Field from the text viewer
To send text to field from the text viewer:
- Select text in your document and right click to choose the Send to Field option in the context menu. A confirmation window will appear where you can edit the selection before sending it to a field. This is helpful if you need to make change due to an OCR mistake.
You can remove hard returns from the text by clicking the Remove Hard Returns toggle. This automatically removes all hard returns in the text so that you do not need to do this manually within the text field.
Send to Field - Click on a field on a layout in the right pane of the viewer.
- If you select a field that auto-populates (fixed-length text, long text, date, whole number, decimal, or currency), you are done and can click Save.
- If you select a field that requires manual value selection (single/multiple object, single/multiple choice, or yes/no), select a value and click Save.
- After saving, a green underline will appear under your text and a green dot will appear near the field. If you click the field, it will navigate you to the text and the underline will turn orange.
Send to Field highlights appear as green blocks in the Highlights minimap.
Send to field from the image viewer
To Send to Field from the image viewer, follow the steps for sending to field from the text viewer. The slide out at the top of the page will include the cropped image of your selection to compare to the extracted text below it. As with the text viewer, you can edit the text before sending to field.
Sending to long text fields multiple times
For long text fields, you can send to one field many times from different locations. For example, if you have an All Assignment Language field and assignment language appears throughout the contract, you can send each location to the field.
When a long text field already contains text and you Send to Field again, you'll see a modal to append, prepend, or replace.
- Prepend—will place your new text before the existing text.
- Append—will place your new text after the existing text.
- Replace—will replace existing text with your new text.
If you choose to Prepend or Append, hover over the field after you Save to see how many highlight locations that field has associated with it. If you click the field multiple times, it will cycle through all highlights.
Coding contracts with data point suggestions
Administrators can configure data point suggestions, which use regular expressions and persistent highlights results to suggest possible values to help reviewers make a coding decision.
For information on how to configure data point suggestions, see Set up data points in the viewer.
Using data point suggestions, reviewers can expand a field to view suggested values and send them to the field. This can help reviewers locate relevant data and make coding decisions more quickly.
To code documents using fields linked by data point suggestions:
-
Click the link icon next to the field name.

-
Click the data point group to expand it and view all individual results. The number next to the group name represents the total number of results found.

- Click a result to navigate to its location in the contract. Assess the relevance of the result to the field.
- Hover over a result and click the check mark to populate the field with that value. This functions the same as Send to Field.
Coding at the section level
When you are coding a document in the Contracts Viewer, your coding decisions will save on the parent root agreement by default. If you would like a coding decision to save on a section document instead:
- Right-click a section in the sections pane of the Contracts Viewer and click Code Section.
- The layout reloads, and a header bar appears to indicate that you are coding a section. The coding values now reflect the section document, not the main document.
Make coding decisions on the layout as you normally would. Section coding supports Send to Field and all other coding capabilities. -
Once you make your coding decisions, click Save .
Saving does not exit section coding mode. To exit section coding mode and begin coding the main document again, click the Exit button in the header bar.
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