Toolkit Standards

Here is a checklist of often overlooked tasks in Toolkit development. Those elements more closely associated with a Table, Form, Child Form or Wizard have their own dedicated pages below.

Standards

In a nutshell: the bullets below are finishing touches that you should do to make your work complete, professional, thorough and easy for users to work with. Even if you neglect to do all of these, the software will still work, but it will not be as effective and user-friendly.

Enter a table description in the Table setup. If you neglect this, then when users run a Query they see the raw table name instead of the user-friendly description.
The Object Wizard cannot know where to put your Group Item Links. Put these in a good place and keep them from becoming a disorganized mess. For most tables, they do not belong on the main vertical menu (check "hide/disable" on the first group item link to do this). Order them properly. Be sure the link name makes sense and is not overly long. It might make sense to give the Object an appropriate (if long) name, but you might be able to shorten the group item links for brevity.
If you have a simple lookup code table, take a moment to add it to the Setup Profile page in the appropriate module. This is much more user-friendly. After doing this, hide all the other group item links as these links are now clutter.
If you add an extender column that is a foreign key to a lookup table, then please add this lookup table as a From Table to the main table. This enables the user to output the code in the List Result of a Query. If you neglect to do this, then this extender column becomes impossible to output!
If you add a child table, then on the Find page for this Table's Object, the user will want to be able to do searches based on data from the main table. Add any obvious Search Controls to make this easier for the end user. Similarly, on the List Result page the user will want to see data from the parent tables. To do this, add additional From Columns to the List Table setup. This step is easy to do but often overlooked and it means users have less functionality and more difficulty finding their records.
If you are adding a child table off co_customer, then add the Lookup and Related Object. This will ensure that the form can be successfully used as a "stand alone" form. Be sure your form will indeed work as a stand alone form.

^[todo]:

If you are adding a table with a FK column to co_customer.cst_key then add your table as a Dedup Table so the Combine and Merge Duplicate Records will work on that table and not produce foreign key violations.

Toolkit Standards

Standards

See Also