Just throwing a general discussion topic. Whats the general opinion about the custom tables referring to standard tables. What are the pros and cons.
Pro: Ease of checking data integrity?
Cons: Maintenance overhead?

Custom Tables referring to standard tables. Everyone will have varying opinions. My 2 cents -

Creating the reference is the main risk. Always it should be tested to be sure you are not removing some data. Referring to a standard table requires that the standard table be converted to runtime as well. When importing table changes, that's why a full create runtime is sometimes required, all those reference tables. This means system downtime while the reference is converted, and long instructions if you are delivering the change to someone else to install.

After getting it in successfully, however, there is little risk. When Patches are applied, you generally have to run a create runtime anyway, your change will not affect that in any negative way. It should require little upkeep after it's in place. Only dangers are things like fields being removed, etc, and Baan very rarely would do that.

In my opinion, there is some risk at install, but the pro's outweigh this. Not only the data integrity, which alone is enough, but the automatic creating of zooms and description fields etc. when generating sessions on your custom table is also helpful. Things flow better and how the user expects them when the references are in place correctly.

Creating a referring table is much perferred over something like adding fields to an existing table.

I am a believer in reference lookups to validate data always. As a practice I will set up a reference with lookup (not counter) to provide performace and to avoid a lengthy runtime conversion. However when you do this, the field that you are setting the reference on should itself be included in an index of its own table.

Example, I have a new table that I have a field to reference the item master table. On my new table, item will be included in one of the indexes. This provides validation for my new table to the item master, and a quick reference lookup for anyone doing maintenance on the item master to validate if an item was used in my new table without doing a full table scan.

If u have reference set to transaction tables like sales order , production order and u have mandatory reference , u may have problem archiving/ purging the same. Baan archiving sessions may fail. This aspect also needs to be kept in mind.

1. If references are made the table defintion of the standard table is pulled down to the custom VRC. Doesn't that seem to be an overhead?

2. With DAL concept in BaaN 5.0b and above whats the pros and cons putting references at table level vs coding in DAL, other than the delete "lookup reference" which cannot be done thru DAL.

Are there any CONS at all on using references to Std tables, or it can be a free world for developers?