Sanity Check ? Making Changes to a Key Field of a Rather Large Parent Table

The Request

I?m hoping you all can help me out and make sure I?m not about to do anything that will break my app.  I?m the only admin in my company, and my only real database training was a brief stint at a former job, the initial QuickBase training when we signed up, and the hacking and slashing and brute force learning I?ve done over the past year.  While I?d say that I?m pretty strong given the circumstances, I?m a little unclear on the inner workings on relationships and key fields.  Can you look over the following plan to and let me know of any potential issue?

Almost every table in my app has the customer tables as a parent record.  Before importing our customer list last year, I didn?t really think to do much data cleanup (I was a rookie, what can I say?).  Now, we have some customers and leads listed in all caps, which causes various issues, most notably with mobile users (sometimes it can ?break? the link).  What?s even more fun is that the customer name is the key field. _ _Since I'm going in to make updates anyway, there are some other minor consistency issues I'd like to fix along the way.

Previously, I learned the hard way that if you edit a key field of a record, you need to manually link the record to its children records.  And since we?re talking about over 6000 customers, that seems like a really bad plan to me.

Except for one, all of the children tables are in the same app, and the other app in question is so rarely used that I could manually fix the records, if needed.  We?re only talking about ten records, there.

Since we have such a large number of customers, we use the ?the values in this field depend on a selection in another field? feature to first filter by county before selecting the customer name from the drop-down menu.  Although adding the record directly from the parent record would be more ideal, searching by county is much more convenient for our sales reps while they're out in the field.

I tested everything below in a copy of the app, and I think it will work.  That being said, I don?t want it to seem like it?s working and then find out 3 weeks later that everything behind the scenes is falling apart.

The Solution:

1) Ensure no users are online during the update time period

2)      Change Key Field from Customer Name to Record ID

3)      Update all customers to fit naming conventions

          a.       Using Grid Edit, copy Customer Names to Excel

          b.       Use ?Proper? function to change the names to lower case

          c.       Paste updated names to Grid Edit

4)      Change Key Field from Record ID to Customer Name

5)      Redefine ?the values in this field depend on a selection in another field? for all related tables

6)      Cross my fingers, hope, and pray that nothing broke.