I have the wonderful position of remaking our entire database from scratch. Previously we had 7 databases with different departments in each database. All related together, all changes/new features were done on the production databases. This was horrible, and had lots of organization problems.

I'm reorganizing and rebuilding the databases, separating data from layouts.

We have a contact database for storing all data about customers and prospects. There is a field called ContactID that is a calculated field - Joining Company Name and Contact Name.

This field is used by other layouts as a dropdown list to select the contact. Currently our databases perform a lookup to grab the contact data.

Is this the correct way of building the database? Or is it better to place the contact fields of the related record into the new layout i'm building and prevent users from entering those fields while in browse mode.

The question is if the record is keeping track with historical event's such as where a shipment have ended... or such.

Invoices item lines have a price which needs to be looked up if the warehouse price is likely to change.

But again other parts such a zip/postcodes that pulls in a certain locations name are safer bets for live relations ...so the answer must be some of the contact data might be lookups if there is going to be a dispute or a govermental claims that you keep a historical track of events.

--sd

Lookups will prevent the user from mucking up the original record. On the otherhand, they can't update the info for other users either without an extra step.

Also - using related fields means that when someone changed the orignal data, all the old records change too.

I'd use lookups and then offer a button to "update" the source record. the button can either bring up a window to edit the source record or it can use "set field" to sort of copy and paste the edited contents back into the source record.

offer a button to "update" the source record. the button can either bring up a window to edit the source record or it can use "set field" to sort of copy and paste the edited contents back into the source record.

Or it could use the Relookup Field Contents [] script step.