Reference data

Reference data (/admin/reference-data) is where you review — and now maintain — the lookup values MaxTrax uses throughout the project: weld types, materials, pipe schedules, inspection types, and more.

Most of these lists are yours to manage. A small number come from industry standards or from MaxTrax itself, and those are clearly marked as read-only.

Before you start

You need Corporate Administrator access or higher to open this hub. The same level is needed to add, rename, or retire an entry — there’s no separate permission to request.

If a list shows no Add button, there are two possible reasons, and each card says which applies: a card reading “You don’t have permission to change this list” means your account is below Corporate Administrator, while “Read-only — maintained by MaxTrax” means nobody can edit that list, whatever their role (see Lists you can’t change).

The hub

Categories are grouped into three sections:

Group	Categories
Welding	Weld types, Welding processes, Components
Materials	Base materials, Filler materials, Material heats, Pipe schedules
Inspection & NDE	Inspection types, NDE contractors, NDE technicians, Film-interval statuses

Every card tells you two things before you click:

• Its entry count. A category with zero entries shows an Empty badge — a genuine gap worth following up on, not a display glitch. If a count can’t be read at all, the card shows a dash rather than a false zero.
• Whether you can change it. A card either says “You can add and edit entries” or “Read-only — maintained by MaxTrax”, so you never open a list expecting an Add button that isn’t there.

Use the search box to jump straight to a category — it understands the vocabulary you’d actually search for, not just the category label. For example, searching “F-number” finds Filler materials, “mill cert” finds Material heats, and “NPS” finds Pipe schedules.

Drilling into a category

Select a category card to see its Name and Code columns, with a filter box to narrow a long list. A lateral switcher lets you jump between categories without going back to the hub.

A long category shows 100 entries at a time. The line under the list says which entries you are looking at and how many the category holds, for example “Showing 101–200 of 27,003 entries”. Use Previous and Next to move through it. A category of 100 entries or fewer shows every entry and just its count.

The filter box searches the whole category, not only the entries on screen. It matches any part of an entry’s code or name (for NDE technicians, the stencil, first name or last name), and starts from the first page of results. If nothing matches, select Clear the filter to go back to the full list.

Adding an entry

Select Add … above the list. You’ll be asked for a code and a name, plus an optional description. The new entry becomes selectable everywhere that list is used — import matching, weld and inspection forms, reports.

A code must be unique, and it can’t be reused later even after the entry is retired, so that old records stay readable. If the code is already taken, the form stays open and tells you.

Renaming an entry

Select the pencil beside a row. You can change the name; you can’t change the code, because existing records point at it. If a code is genuinely wrong, retire that entry and create a new one.

Descriptions are replaced, not merged

The reference list doesn’t carry an entry’s existing description, or the internal notes other systems may have set against it, so neither can be shown on the edit form. Saving writes whatever the form holds over both — even if you only changed the name. If a description matters, re-enter it before saving. The form states this too, above the fields.

Retiring an entry

Select the archive icon beside a row and confirm. Retiring is not deleting. Nothing is destroyed:

• Welds, inspections, and every other record that already references the entry keep it and still display it.
• It simply stops being offered when someone picks a value from that list from now on.

After each retirement a banner offers Restore so you can undo a mistake on the spot. Retire several and you get a banner each, so an earlier undo is never taken away by a later retirement. Take them while you are there — retired entries aren’t listed on this screen, so once you leave the page there’s no way to bring one back from here. If that happens, raise it with MaxTrax support.

NDE technicians

NDE technicians are people rather than a code-and-name pair, so their form asks for a name, stencil, NDE contractor, and qualifications instead. Certification effective and expiry dates are captured separately, on the NDE technicians admin screen (/admin/nde-technicians).

Code editions

Below the categories, under Codes & standards, the Code editions card opens the code-edition register (/admin/reference-data/code-editions). It lists every code and edition pair that an inspection or WPS citation can point at — for example B31.3 2022 or ASME-IX 2023 — and, unlike the category lists above, it shows retired editions too, marked with a Retired badge.

• Add an edition with New code edition: enter the code (such as B31.3) and the edition (such as 2024 — it doesn’t have to be a year). Each is at most 32 characters. The new edition can be picked in citations straight away.
• A pair can only exist once. If the same code and edition is already in the register — even as a retired edition — it can’t be added again. Reactivate the retired one instead.
• Retire an edition that has been superseded. Citations already made against it keep showing it exactly as they were; it just stops being offered (and accepted) for new citations.
• Reactivate brings a retired edition back into the citation picker.

Each row always shows both Retire and Reactivate; the one that doesn’t apply to the row’s current state is greyed out. An edition is never deleted.

Lists you can’t change

Weld types are a controlled vocabulary maintained by MaxTrax, so weld data stays comparable across projects and tenants. The list opens read-only with that reason stated, and there is no Add or Edit control on it at all. If your project needs a weld type that doesn’t exist, raise it with MaxTrax support rather than working around it.

Pipe schedules ship pre-loaded from the ASME B36.10 / B36.19 standard tables, but unlike weld types they are extensible — add an entry if your project uses a schedule the standard tables don’t cover.

Reaching this from elsewhere

The Admin dashboard’s config-health checklist deep-links straight into a category when it’s empty — a “Review {category}” button opens that category’s drill-in directly, so a flagged gap and this hub can never disagree about where a category lives.

Related

• Admin — the dashboard whose config-health checklist surfaces reference-data gaps.
• Import file spec — how an import row is matched against reference data, and what happens when a referenced code doesn’t exist yet.
• Welder qualifications settings — a different admin settings surface, not reference data.