Mike,
I finally found an office within my organization that has MOSS 2007 setup on
a development server, and was able to test some of the information in
Alison's book. I published an application that consists of 39 tables, 45
forms, well over 100 queries, and about a dozen reports. When I was done,
the application was available in a document library on the portal. Clicking
on the app opened the file with all of the links. Although the application
functioned properly (for the most part), I was disappointed with the time it
took for forms to load. Additionally, because of the ID issues discussed
below at least one of the forms that contained a treeview to display a
heirarchy did not display properly. This was remedied by updating the
Parent_ID field.
While the steps she lays out in the document are accurate, I found a number
of problems with the lists (not mentioned in her article) that were imported
when I published the application to MOSS. Errors I received include:
1. Issue:Field values will not be auto-generated.
Reason: SharePoint only supports autonumber for their ID field.
Discussion: During the import of my tables, the wizard took my primary
key fields ( as an example I'll use [Lab_ID]), relabeled it as [_ID] and gave
it an integer data type (all the data in this field was properly retained).
Then it created it's own Autonumber field, and gave it the [Lab_ID] field
name. Unfortunately, it generated a sequential list for this field, and I
have not had a chance to check whether it changed the FK values in the tables
that it was related to or not. The down side of this is that one of my
tables is setup with an ID, Parent_ID heirarchy, and the parent ID values
were no longer valid. So to get my application to work properly, I had to
update all of the parent ID values.
2. Issue: Referential Integrity will not be enforced.
Reason: SharePoint does not support referential integrity.
Discussion: There were actually three issues listed that all relate to
referential integrity, cascading updates and cascading deletes. Obviously if
MOSS does not support referential integrity, then it cannot support either
of the other two items. This also means that you have to write your code to
handle the deletion of records or values when a PK is deleted.
3. Issue
efault value property will not be moved.
Reason: The Default Value property was set to an expression that will
not be specified on the SharePoint column. Specifically, it was neither a
static value nor =Date(), which only applies to Date fields.
Discussion:I had a couple of date/time fields with default value
=Now(). Apparantly, MOSS only recognizes a static value or the Date()
function, not Now().
4. Issue:SharePoint does not support unique indexes on any column other
than ID.
Reason:Unique Index will not be enforced.
Discussion: Obviously requires additional coding to check for
duplicates before inserting a record.
--
HTH
Dale
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