Lost All Field Rules in a Table.

[JohnFabrega]

We have a desktop application that has morphed over the years from the old DOS days to currently running v12. (Currently running build 5887-5315) All desktop. It is basically our only Alpha app.

Last week I simply added an additional logical field to our 'Customer' table and did some work on a new report.

Today, employees mentioned that some functionality had changed. Specifically a couple of fields that had Drop-Down choices no longer functioned that way.

After some sleuthing and comparison of a previous backed up version, I have determined that all of the Field Rules for that table have disappeared. I believe that they are stored in the 'Data Dictionary' .ddd file.

Comparing the old vs new, old is about 6k new is about 4k.

I'm hoping for a way to restore the field rules from a previous backup without disturbing database changes that have been made since the last backup.

My alternative would be to try to re-create them through stare and compare.

Any thoughts/ideas/cautions?

[Tom Cone Jr]

John, if this were happening to me, I'd create a "sandbox" copy of the workspace to play in, by copying over everything in the current workspace directory.

Then,
- I'd delete the new field, returning structure to what existed before field rules were lost; and
- I'd copy in the -ddd, -ddx, and -ddm files for the table from a good backup; overwriting the empy or damaged dictionaries
- I'd then verify the integrity of the rules; are they present and working?
- If some of the lookups are misbehaving, check to see if necessary indexes have been removed for the lookup source tables; restore them if necessary

Assuming you've recovered to "where you were"...
- Change the structure of the table again; being careful to use a legal fieldname, preferable 10 chars wide or less.

- stop and check integrity of field rules again.

Assuming all is well, plan on implementing the changes to the live workspace ONLY after confirming no one else on the network is using Alpha.

-- tom

[JohnFabrega]

John, if this were happening to me, I'd ...


-- tom

Tom,

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond.

I've spent most of the day doing as you suggested as well as doing a ton of research in the help files and this board. Can't tell you how many 'sandboxes' I created to find out when/where the field rules were lost.

Ultimately, I stumbled across this thread and a number of other conversations surrounding it. For a while I way stuck not seeing the 'Restore Prior Version' option at the bottom of the right-click dialogs. I was just about to give up, re-opened a workspace, right-clicked on the table and there it was with restore points back to 2013! Less than 10 minutes ago, I restored from a couple of versions prior and it worked!

I also learned a bunch about some different backup strategies and am in the process of implementing them NOW.