I can't speak to "best practices", but IMHO it really depends two things: the expected size of the content and how you plan to use it.
With regard to the expected content, if you're planning to document something with a relatively limited life-cycle and not a lot of content, then I think diary fields are an excellent choice: they're very easy to create and maintain and don't require setting up the child form, workflow, and UI needed to support it that the "PK/FK" paradigm requires. But if you're planning to document something with an indefinite life-cycle, where the content may grow continuously, then diary fields become a bad choice. Remember that these are stored in your DB as a blob (text, ntext, etc), so the entire content needs to be read and written on each access or update (respectively). What's worse is that this entire content needs to be transferred over the wire multiple times (from DB to ARS to mid-tier to client and back again). This obviously gets cumbersome when the content is very large. With regard to planned usage, if you're planning on setting up complex searching (or reporting) on the content, diary fields are difficult to use. On the other hand, if you plan to use the content only for review (e.g. users will only need to read through them to see what happened and when), then diary fields are perfect for the job. Hope this helps. -charlie On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Rick Cook <[email protected]> wrote: > ** > Yes, they are not the best practice any more. Best practice is to > accumulate records in a back-end form and use a PK/FK relationship to tie > them to a master record (i.e. Work Logs to an Incident. Reporting can be > challenging, but a join at the reporting level should make things easier. > > Rick Cook > > On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Reiser, John J <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> ** >> Hello Listers, >> I have quick question. >> What is the general consensus on the use of Diary fields? >> Are they going out of style? >> I have tried a “work log” table type of design to replace the diary >> function on a form. >> This method works ok except when it comes time to run reports. >> Do you dump the table field data to a large character field? >> Or is there a slick way to incorporate the child records into the report >> on the fly? >> >> Thank you, >> --- >> John J. Reiser >> Remedy Developer/Administrator >> Senior Software Development Analyst >> Lockheed Martin - MS2 >> The star that burns twice as bright burns half as long. >> Pay close attention and be illuminated by its brilliance. - paraphrased >> by me >> >> >> >> _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ > > > _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ > _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
