CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am relatively new to Civi development. I am developing a payment processor and referencing a custom field that needs to be passed on to the external payment processor. In my development Civi system, based on the provided sample data, the new created custom field is named as custom_53.

I would appreciate any help or advice on how I might be able to control the name of the custom field. My issue is that when I port my processor to difference environment, that is, customer's test and live environment, and setup the custom field, the internal reference to the field will be different in each environment. I would like to be able insulate the code from these name changes without changing my code each time.