Protect Form (not Record) from Deletion

[Chris Jones]

Hi there. I’ve been using this product for a few years now and have been very happy with it overall. There’s been one thing that’s been bugging me for a while, and I’m wondering if perhaps it’s just due to me not fully understanding how the application works.

I realize that you can lock a form so that a specific record cannot be deleted, but what protections can be put in place to protect the form and all of the records associated with it? I have spent countless hours working on a specific form, with over 22,000 records in it. And it seems like if I (or somebody else) wanted to destroy untold hours of work, all I have to do is right click the form and choose “delete” and it’s all gone (which cannot be undone). Isn’t there a way to prevent me from doing this accidentally?

I realize I can create backups, which I do, however those take quite some time and I just do those periodically (it’s several GB). It’s not practical to create them on a daily basis. I can’t help but feel that there must be a safeguard in place to prevent me from deleting the form itself. Also, if the form is deleted, does that mean all of the records are gone, or are they buried under the hood somewhere and I can create a new form and rebuild it, referencing the records I had created previously.

Sorry for being longwinded and if this is something fundamental that I should already understand about how this application works, but from what I can tell, I can delete three years worth of work with one errant mis-click, which I find difficult to believe.

Thanks!

[Brendan]

On the Mac version you can enable access controls to prevent you from deleting a form and all its records.

Select the form, then click the Form button on the toolbar.

Then scroll all the way down to the bottom on the form properties panel.

Enable the Access Controls and leave Customize Form unchecked.

Then enable the other options you want such as Create Records, Update Records, and Delete Records. Or disable Delete Records if you don’t want to be able to delete records.

Then click the little lock button below.

Now if you try to delete the form, you’ll be told you don’t have permissions to do that.

Thanks,

Brendan

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[Chris Jones]

Thanks for the response, however this doesn’t prevent me from deleting the actual form, which as I originally stated, is my concern. I tried testing this before, but I tried a second time just now. I created a new form, added a few records, and enabled the protection in the form in which I shouldn’t be able to delete the records, however this doesn’t protect the form itself from being deleted. If you see the attached images, you can see that I enabled the protections but was still permitted to delete the form, even after it warns me that any records associated with it will also be deleted. It then proceeded to delete the entire form.

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[Brendan]

That’s because you have Customize Form enabled. Turn that off.

[Chris Jones]

That did it! Thank you for clearing that up for me!

[Author]

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