Question

Best practices for updating the LF forms database directly

Laserfiche

Updated April 3, 2023

asked on March 31, 2023

This might come back as a hard "no", but if one has many, many, many forms with labels that need to be changed, Is updating them directly on the server supported or safe?

For example, can we change the "label" field in the [dbo].[cf_fields] table - it's just text and not an ID so it seems safe, but I'm guessing it can't be that easy.... This would save us a lot of time... would be even MORE useful if we can also update the text for the choices...

Let me know if you've done this or know the potential consequences...

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SELECTED ANSWER

replied on March 31, 2023

Making any changes directly to any of the Laserfiche databases is not supported.

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replied on March 31, 2023

I figured that was the answer. thank you!

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replied on March 31, 2023 • Show version history

A cautionary tale:

There have been many times where I, in my capacity as a Laserfiche employee authorized to test such things, have made a copy of a Laserfiche application database in a test environment, tried changing some "simple" values like field labels, and immediately, catastrophically broken core application functionality. Foreign key associations are a minefield.

Often when something didn't clearly break immediately, more subtle and insidious issues popped up later. These were typically much more difficult to fix due to cascading issues from the original change that were much harder to unwind.

So to reiterate:

Making any changes directly to any of the Laserfiche databases is not supported, unless you're:

specifically instructed to do so by Laserfiche Support, or
performing an officially documented, sanctioned change like this

Read-only queries against Laserfiche application databases are permitted, though we make no guarantees about schema changes between versions.

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Replies

replied on March 31, 2023

What is the end goal here though? Existing submissions and process history are meant to be a record of what happened in the process at the time. Why would you want to update labels after the fact?

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replied on April 3, 2023

In this case, it's to standardize field names so they are all the same across every form. Over time, some have changed (or were entered wrong). We copy a form from one language to another and currently have to change all the field names. This would help with consistency and speed up translated forms.

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Best practices for updating the LF forms database directly

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