Does anyone have any advice on adding a text field to an existing table without losing the data? So far all I can come up with is exporting the data, making the change including deleting and recreating the table, and then inporting the data back in.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Simon

You should not have to run through all that to add a field, why - have you had a bad experience? Usually, only the following is required to just add a field to a table. Try this in a test system first. Best to backup before doing especially in live.

1. Find the table, copy to your production / test VRC, add the field. This field should be of domain 'tctxtn'

2. Run Convert to Runtime. This should be done when people are off the system, it will need to reconfigure the text tables as well. It may take some time.
3. Exit Baan, return. The field should now exist on your table - check General Table Maintenance to verify the new field.

If the VRC is clean and you don't normally have a problem running the Convert to Runtime, then this is a straightforward process.

If you have had bad experiences - please let us know before trying this. Some systems have already 'messed up' VRC's and just running the reconfigure can cause problems. You would have to run this anyway, though, even if you drop the data and import when done. If this ends in 'serious errors', your right you are dropping your data and not getting it back unless you run the recover process.

One land mind I have found is if you are running MS SQL, the transaction logging can fill up if this reconfigure takes up too much space. If it fills up at a bad time, even with the auto-expand option, it will kill the reconfigure, and possibly require recovery. I have been told by Baan support that it is best to turn Transaction Logging off during a reconfigure. If you have a backup it will be much faster to recover than via the logging.

Making a table change to an existing table should not cause anything to be lost. The new field will be empty, but that should be okay. I do recommend making a backup of the table - just in case the convert-to-runtime has errors.

Mark

I guess, your concern is that you will lose data since you delete the table. You do not need to delete the table when you reconfigure !!!

Thanks all.

I'll give it a go on our test server.

Many thanks.

Simon