Bill Benson
bensonforums at gmail.com
Tue Mar 25 09:27:59 CDT 2014
<<records should never be deleted and should <<only be toggled/flagged active or inactive. I know the toggle /flag suffices usually but I like knowing WHEN a record became inactive (or got reactivated). Since there is enough info in these date fields to infer whether a record is active, I eliminated the IsActive flag. I started using Last Made Active Date and Last Made Inactive Date fields in entity tables. To determine if a record is active it has to satisfy this If Nz (LMID,#1/1/1900#) < LMAD. The LMAD can work as a CREATE date, if willing to let that be overridden upon reactivation. I chose to have both LMAD and a Create date. Can't have too many dates, I had none in high school. I don't know whether that test for active records slows down the database but it never seemed to make a difference in systems I was working on. I think another option would be logging tables, but I was not that interested nor was the client, we were building a prototype.