Solved: What happens when you remove a referenced item?

JpChapron · 08-07-2022 05:48 AM

Hi,

So this might be a silly question, but what happens if I remove a Referenced item.

Example : I have 100 reports with a username on it. It's a ref column. The user quits the company so I remove the user in the user Table. But if It go back to the Report this user created, will I still be able to produce anything with it ? Or will I get errors every-time.

Thanks !

thanks !

MultiTech

Questions are never silly mate; curiosity is a beautiful thing. (^_^)

What happens largely depends on how you put things together, as well as what sort of system things are in place.

If you've turned on the, is a part of toggle, for any of the child records - when you delete the user, it will delete all of their associated child records. (So you probably don't want to do that)
After the user is deleted, when you look at one of the records you'll see a little yellow triangle. This is the systems icon to indicate that the reference value being shown is not found in the reference table.
If you try and modify the record, depending on how you set up your validation formulas, you might not be able to edit the record after the user is deleted - because the user value will be invalid, and the system won't let you do anything else until you fix that.

Generally speaking, especially for a user table, which plays such a vital role in the core functionality of any system you're going to build, you're not going to want to remove the actual user records.

Instead you'd want to create a way to mark a user as inactive, and then make all of your user drop-downs use the list of active users only.
This way the system still has that original user record, and every validation formula and all the processes and things will continue to work the way that they need to.

View solution in original post

MultiTech

Questions are never silly mate; curiosity is a beautiful thing. (^_^)

What happens largely depends on how you put things together, as well as what sort of system things are in place.

If you've turned on the, is a part of toggle, for any of the child records - when you delete the user, it will delete all of their associated child records. (So you probably don't want to do that)
After the user is deleted, when you look at one of the records you'll see a little yellow triangle. This is the systems icon to indicate that the reference value being shown is not found in the reference table.
If you try and modify the record, depending on how you set up your validation formulas, you might not be able to edit the record after the user is deleted - because the user value will be invalid, and the system won't let you do anything else until you fix that.

Generally speaking, especially for a user table, which plays such a vital role in the core functionality of any system you're going to build, you're not going to want to remove the actual user records.

Instead you'd want to create a way to mark a user as inactive, and then make all of your user drop-downs use the list of active users only.
This way the system still has that original user record, and every validation formula and all the processes and things will continue to work the way that they need to.

JpChapron

Hey Matt, me again, So I've added a collumn to my user list that lists them TRUE or FALSE (Active or inactive).

Now, my forms are the Ref type, and if I put an expression like this one :

LIST(SELECT(USER[USER_ID],[USER_ACTIVE]=True))

It creates an error because well, it's looking for a reference.

I'm scratching my head as to how I would be able to implement my list of active user in my User Collumn

Any pointers ?

thanks

JpChapron

Great answer, as usual ! thanks so much