I have an employee table where the Key Field is their Employee ID Number, now we are wanting to allow a new set of users to access and use this table; the recruiters. The problem is during the hiring process there is no Employee ID # assigned for the recruiter to use.
I need some type of work around - I want to retain the Employee ID Number as the Key Field, but I am not sure of a creative way to get around some of this.... and thoughts or ideas would be GREATLY appreciated!!
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Hans Hamm
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Question
Key Field Work Around
+8This topic has been closed for replies.
+14I had a similar situation and end up regretting using the Employee ID as my key. The only thing I came up with was using a temporary placeholder for the employee ID (if it is a text field it could be like TEMP-001, if it numeric maybe 99999, 99998,99997, etc) and changing it later.
The catch there is if you have any child fields, you need to write an automation that says if you change the parent key field, go through the children and change the related field to match. Otherwise, all your children will be orphaned.
In our company, they actually can switch employee IDs for a few different reasons (mostly if they switched internal departments/companies). I rebuilt my app so that I had an employee table with name, email, phone, emergency contacts, etc etc. Then an employee ID table that stored their employee ID, company, supervisor etc. The items that are specific to that ID. That helped me as I could enter the employee and add the ID later. I use the ID as a key so I can import time cards and other info, which I can still do.
However, I wish i had made the employee id a text field instead of numeric so i could have leading zeros.
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Mike Tamoush
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The catch there is if you have any child fields, you need to write an automation that says if you change the parent key field, go through the children and change the related field to match. Otherwise, all your children will be orphaned.
In our company, they actually can switch employee IDs for a few different reasons (mostly if they switched internal departments/companies). I rebuilt my app so that I had an employee table with name, email, phone, emergency contacts, etc etc. Then an employee ID table that stored their employee ID, company, supervisor etc. The items that are specific to that ID. That helped me as I could enter the employee and add the ID later. I use the ID as a key so I can import time cards and other info, which I can still do.
However, I wish i had made the employee id a text field instead of numeric so i could have leading zeros.
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Mike Tamoush
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