Dual Purpose User Table
Any thought to expanding the use of the User Table to be dual purpose?:
-- User Access
-- General contact information
If the table had set system fields for the User Account (as it does now), then allowed us to add additional fields for such things as profile attributues, LTP and Child tables, etc like we have in other Employee/Contact tables, then a simple User Account Activation Flag would enable the User rights pieces, otherwise when the flag is in the "Off" position, the record is just a plain Employee or Contact as it would be in another table.
This would make things more efficient and avoid us having to track the same person in separate tables.

2 comments
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Andrew commented
As always John, thank you for your well-formed ideas. I will pass this concept along to our product team and I do have a few thoughts of my own to share.
In TrackVia, contrary to our Classic application, a major differentiation in the architecture is that each App is separate - meaning tables from one App may not interact with those in another App. Users are granted access to Apps and corresponding components of that Application (i.e., Tables, Views, etc.) via the Roles component. Roles tie into the "Manage Users" system table to select users.
Currently, "Manage Users" is a cross-application table that does not tie into a specific App. Therefore, we would need to do some additional thinking on the extent of interactions between the system Cross-Application table of "Manage Users", and independent Apps themselves. However, clearly there is much to be gained from have one repository of TrackVia users, including the User Activation Flags.
Thank you again for the feedback John!
Andrew
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John McGarvey commented
Thought of 1 more thing, the User Activation Flag would be used to keep track of actual users. Any record with an "On" flag would could as a license.