Custom fields on Master Air Waybills (MAWBs): adding values, viewing them, and filtering or searching by them

What are custom fields on Air shipments?

Custom fields let you store your own references alongside the tracking data Portcast provides, such as PO numbers, customer names, sales orders or internal reference numbers.

Ocean and Air tracking share one set of custom fields. Every field your organisation has already created for containers is also available on your MAWBs, and any new field you create applies to both. A reference like a PO number therefore means the same thing whichever mode the cargo travels on.

Custom fields are created and managed on the Custom Fields settings page (previously named "Org Settings"). See Adding and Editing Custom Data for how to create a field, choose its type and allow multiple values.

How to add custom data to a MAWB

You can add custom data to a MAWB in two ways:

1. In the Web App, from the Custom Data tab of the single Air Shipment page (see below).
2. Through the Portcast API:
   • Send custom fields together with the airway bill when you start tracking a MAWB, so your references are attached from the first upload
   • Create, update, read and delete custom field values on a MAWB that is already tracked
   • Set custom fields on many shipments in one call with the bulk custom fields endpoint, which accepts MAWBs and containers in the same request
   • Custom field values are returned in the MAWB tracking response, in the same format as container tracking data

See the Portcast API documentation for request and response formats.

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Uploading MAWBs with custom fields through a file is not available yet. Use the Custom Data tab or the API to add custom data to air shipments.

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Where can I view and edit custom data?

Single Air Shipment page: Custom Data tab

Open any MAWB from the Airway Bill list and select the Custom Data tab. It lists the custom fields of your organisation and their values for that MAWB.

• Click a value to edit it inline, then save your change
• For multi-value fields, use + to add more values
• For fields with sub fields, add or edit the sub field values under the parent field

See How to use the single Air Shipment view for the rest of the page.

Airway Bill list: custom field columns

On the Airway Bill list, open Configure Table Columns and select the custom fields you want to display. They are listed under Custom Fields, next to the standard tracking columns. Your column choice is saved for your user.