[AccessD] Cascade-delete (was: Estimating Help)

Rocky,

What I was saying the other day is simply that cascade delete has no ability
to assess the "rights" of the person deleting something.  The alternative in
your situation is to build a set of queries that join:

Rental Agreement to CheckInOut
RentalAgreement to ItemsSold
RentalAgreement to Labor
and finally RentalAgreement with SubRental (subsystem)

by setting a where clause under the RentalAgreement PK or other defining
field and turning each of these into a delete query, you delete the child
items to RentalAgreement.  One by one, you delete the child records
(Checkout, ItemsSold, Labor, and Subrental).  Once the child records are
gone, you delete the RentalAgreement.

Of course cascade delete is free.  And of course building these queries is
work.  But... now that you have these queries you can use various strategies
to determine who gets to delete the RentalAgreement and it's children, and
equally important, who doesn't.

I pretty much agree with Arthur, deleting records is mostly inappropriate in
a database.  In any event, the ability (right) to do so should rest in the
hands of VERY senior people, not just the person behind the cash register.

Cascade delete, by it's nature can't differentiate.  If it's enabled, my cat
walking across the keyboard could (theoretically) delete a record (or worse
a thousand records in a dozen different child directories).

When I was working down in Mexico I had an experience that forever changed
my view of the user interface.  In Mexico companies often hire what we would
almost call "manservants" - uneducated "lower class" workers to do simple
things like run around town doing things, and of course cleaning.  I came
back from lunch one day to find the cleaning lady cleaning the keyboard of
the computer... that happened to be in a record of real data (well, used to
be real anyway).  Fields Across the form were filled with
!!!!!!!!@@@@@@@@########$$$$$$%%%%% and
QQQQWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRTTTTTTTTTYYYYYY - whatever keys she had been
diligently rubbing the dirt off of.

That opened my eyes to the damage that can be done quite unexpectedly in a
database.  She had no authorization to edit records, nor delete data.  But
she was doing her job, and there she was editing my real user's data.  And
she could just as easily have deleted your rental records while she cleaned
the keyboard.