I am wondering what happens on layouts when you change the name of the underlying table occurrence.

I have noted that if I change the table designation of a layout, I have to go through each of the fields on the layout and update the dictionary link to use the layout's new table occurrence (TO). And so, I have refrained from changing my layouts to use specific, contextually useful TO's.

However, I do not know what might happen to these layouts if I change the name or context of an existing TO. My concern is this: I am looking at my initial spaghetti-code Relationship graph that resulted from upgrading to 7 (something like 100 relationships for 18 base tables), and thinking I could rationalize my data structure to be more reliable and clear. But I am unsure whether my layouts will work if I change the underlying TO--either by renaming it, or by rearranging its relationships.

Can anyone advise me?

Thanks,

David

Layouts are tied to the table occurance no matter how the relationships or names change. But if you delete a table occurance, you'll have to reset the layout's TO and fields by hand.

You can even use this fact to help in combining related files. If you had a converted PO system, you could add a new LineItem table to the PO file with all the LineItem fields (exactly), and then reset the source of the previous LineItems TO to be the new LineItem table. Sometimes the fields are out of order in calcs and scripts, but mostly it works.

Or you could go the other way and split off a table into a separate file. Same kind of thing, just backwards.

Okay, thanks for the info.