Consequences of Customizing UDCs

Because UDCs can significantly affect the integrity of your data, you should customize them only as part of a coordinated plan within your enterprise. When you add or change a UDC, you are affecting the set of values against which the system validates the data entry. However, you are not affecting the actual content of any existing data records. By changing UDCs within a working production environment, you might affect the integrity of your data. For example, you use Address Book to enter address book records, and you use search types to classify those records. Suppose that you select a search type of C - Customers to classify some of the records that you enter. Later, you decide to change that UDC from C - Customers to P - Patients. Any address book records that you entered with the original UDC value of C will still contain that value. When Address Book displays these records, you will see an error in the Search Type field because C is no longer a valid value.