Is it a good thing to put all global fields in one seperate table?

[polarpro]

Hey,

The records of my MainTable have fields that store the "actual" data, and global fields. As global fields allow me to do a lot of nice things I've added more and more of them; so that one record now contains lots of them.

I stored a few global fields in another table, and I wonder if this is a good thing to do with all my global fields, in order to have "cleaner" records in the MainTable. Only one record in the GlobalTable would be necessary.

I know that global fields hold a different value for every user, but what happens if a user changes the value in a global field of the GlobalTable's record? Does it get locked then for the other users?

Also, I wonder if there are refresh issues.

So, my questions: Is it a good thing to gather all global fields in one record in a seperate table? Is there a best practice? What needs to be paid attention to?

Thank you for your input!

Mike

[bcooney]

Hello Mike.

It's fairly standard practice to have a single record table for most of your global fields, and a corresponding single record table for their default values. At our firm, we call these tables _SYS and _PREF. In a recent system, we've combined the tables and now just have _SYS (contains both the globals and their corresponding pref value). We name them so that they sort together when sorted alphabetically ( taxrate, taxrate_g)

Our Open System script (which is set to run on File Open) calls an Update Globals script which sets each global field to its corresponding PREF field value.

However, if a user (typically an Admin level user) changes the pref value, none of the global values will change for any currently logged in user until that user runs the Update Globals script. You can call the Update Globals script in the same script that navs to Main Menu. That way, everyone's globals are updated when they return to the main menu.

You mention a user changing a value in a global field. If this is a global that holds a system pref, usually the user changes the pref and then resets the global to the pref.

You'll still need global fields in other tables when they are used in the top half of a relationship. For example, filtered portals.

hth,

Barbara

PS: Search the forums for Startup Scripts, I'll bet you'll find more threads about this.

[polarpro]

Hello Barbara,

Thank you for your detailed and very helpful message.

Many of the global fields that I created are there to help the user creating a find request. From different lists (e.g. country names, content categories) the user can choose what he needs. I reset these global fields when the user starts the "Find" script.

As a lot of scripting and relationships are involved I've been busy this w/e pushing my fields from the Main Table to the System Table – but it looks like it works! :-)

Thanks again!

Mike