Data Loss Without Warning

[bkonia]

I'm developing an application and I had some test data entered. After doing some work on the app, I got an integrity error due to having created an incorrect relationship. Aware IM advised me to delete and re-create the relationship.

The attribute causing the problem was the "Contact" reference attribute. The BO in which the error was occurring was contained within a BOG and each member of the BOG had the same Contact attribute. I deleted the attribute from the BO that had the error, but after deleting it, I noticed that the attribute had also been deleted from all the other BO's in the BOG. Normally, if you delete an attribute from one BO, you get a dialog asking you if you want to also delete the attribute from other members of the BOG. However, for some reason, it didn't give me that option. It just went ahead and deleted it from all of them.

Next, I re-created the attribute in the BO from which it had been deleted. After re-creating it in that BO, it also re-appeared in the other BO's and I no longer had the integrity error. At that point, I published the application. However, after entering the application in Operations mode, I discovered that all the data contained within the Contact attribute had been lost, in all the BO's that had that attribute!

So, I have two questions/comments:

1. Why did it delete the Contact attribute from all the members of the BOG, without giving me the dialog and allowing me to choose which ones I wanted to delete the attribute from?

2. I was under the impression that Aware IM would issue a warning prior to making any changes that would result in data loss. However, in this case, it just went ahead and deleted the attribute, along with its data, without issuing any warning.

By the way, this isn't the first time I've seen this happen. It seems to happen whenever there are integrity errors due to relationships, and I get the prompt to delete and re-create the relationship. I don't see any way to delete a relationship, other than deleting the attribute itself, which apparently leads to data loss. Am I missing something here?

[aware_support]

Well, this is the correct behaviour at the moment and not a bug. Relationship do have certain limitations - the ones you encountered are one of those. You have to re-create the relationship in certain cases. As far as warning about the data loss - it should only happen if you have a business space version in the CURRENT state. If you are still testing and the version is UNDER TESTING, no such warning will be issued.