Introduction to doctype

In frappe framework on which ERPNext is based, doctype is the fundamental building block. It is like a table. you can find more details here. A DocType not only stores fields, but also other information about how your data behaves in the system. We call this Meta. Since this meta-data is also stored in a database table, it makes it easy to change meta-data on the fly without writing much code. Doctype is a table and consists of various docfields. You can refer to the documentation about docfields here

While commond docfield types like Data, Float are self explanatory the following concepts are more important. Link field type - This will allow data to be referred from another table. Like Customer data, Employee data etc. This will also allow you to easily fetch any column from the linked doctype. You can check here Dynamic Link - This will allow the linked doctype to be changed based on the data in the record. You can check the documentation here.

Useful Links 1. Creating doctype 2. Doctype features 3. Example of a doctype creation 4. Field types 5. Frappe Tutorial