Tuesday 28 April 2020

Removing a private field from a form

Disclaimer: all of the below is written to the best of my knowledge. As this topic is barely documented, I have to base my comments on my experience which may well be limited. In other words, there may be a simple way of getting around the pitfall described below of which I am simply unaware.

Extra disclaimer: the pitfall described below seems to a problem specific to one company. I cannot reproduce the error on my system.

The scenario: a client wants to add a new personalised field to an existing form. My normal way of doing this is to add the required field to the base table of the form and then add the field to the form which will display it; a more complicated method involves adding the field to a continuation table (good examples of this are the service calls and projects forms). Built-in triggers on every form are responsible for loading and saving all data which is displayed on the form which is derived from the base table, whereas the developer is responsible for loading and saving data which comes from a continuation table. In other words, if I add a field to a base table and then to a form, I don't have to worry about it being loaded or saved. 

The problem: after a few days' testing, the client decides that she doesn't need the added field. OK: the automatic, unthinking, simple solution is simply to remove the field from the form by deleting the definition. WRONG!!!! Form preparation, after adding the field, will modify the built-in triggers to include the new field (if it was defined as belonging to the base table) and so deleting the field from the form will cause these triggers to scream that they are missing a field when a user accesses this form. What is worse is that 'form preparation' does not detect this problem. The developer has no way of accessing the built-in triggers so it is not possible to remove from them the references to the new field. 

The correct way to 'remove' the added field would seem to be to hide it, not delete it.

In my opinion, the bug is that after deleting the field, form preparation does not update the built-in triggers and instruct them to remove the added field.   

Ironically, displaying the field via a continuation table does not cause this problem as the field is loaded and saved 'manually' and so the developer can simply remove the references to the added field.

[Edit from 09/22: the same problem happened at another company running Priority 21. Fortunately we were working on a test server so the problem will not be propagated to their real server.]

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