Develop Portal Objects

Tips for Writing Access SQL Queries

While best practice is to use the Portal Administration Column Configuration Description field to customize column headers, there is one drawback with this method. If you add or remove a column from the underlying stored procedure result set, you must edit the Portal Query in Portal Administration for the change to take effect. When you edit the Portal Query to add or remove a stored procedure column, customizations made to the Description field in the Portal Administration Column Configuration are removed, and you must reapply them manually.

Re-applying custom descriptions for a few fields in the Portal Query is a simple task. However, if the Portal Query contains many fields with custom descriptions, then this process is somewhat onerous and may justify setting column aliases in the stored procedure SQL query instead of the Column Configuration Description field in Portal Administration.

In summary, best practice is to use the Portal Administration Column Configuration Description field for column header aliases, but there are trade-offs that may justify using column aliases in the stored procedure SQL query where the stored procedure may be frequently modified and where many result set columns require aliases.

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