This is a very important article from Mark. He points out a very critical behavior in Extender. Do read his article to know it better and always remember what he has pointed out while using Extender Windows: Deleting Extender Window Deletes Data As Well.

Let me add some more of them (yeah I do say that as Limitations and NOT Flaws, because we don’t know whether these are overlooked knowingly):

1. I create an Extender Window and records are being entered. And we need to add another field as “Key Field” to that window. And if we do this, the records which are already been entered will become Orphan Records (often called Stranded Records). These records are not automatically amended with the new set of “Key Fields”. Instead, what we see after the “Key Fields” amendment, is a new record on screen and the table as well.

2. When I delete a parent record, the Extender record does not get deleted automatically. Of course, GP tables do not have the Parent Child relationships defined, but this could have been handled by some Dex triggers or even a DB trigger. And that puts me on a fix. As an End User, I am not bothered about what data is stored in which table and whether it still exists when I delete a parent record, but as a Technical guy, I should be bothered, as this is a bad design to keep a stranded record. I hope you all would agree.

3. When I add a Key Field, it automatically sorts it based on the Field Name, which I feel is really frustrating. For instance, I want my Key Fields to be “Customer ID”, “Customer Number”, “Address Code” and once I add these fields on the Key Fields area, these will be automatically sorted as “Address Code”, “Customer ID”, “Customer Number”.

There are more like these small issues. I would like to see the feedback from others to know these things better.

Vaidy