Adding columns to existing Infor files.

I know that in the past it was considered very bad form to even think
about altering Infor's tables.
And people used to come up with all sorts of tricks like instead of adding
columns to the IIM table you would create a new table, like IIM2 and put
the same key on it and just add your new columns to that. And then you
would have to manually keep them in sync. I am really hoping to avoid
that for a number of reasons.

I don't think record format level checks by programs which read those
tables with RPG and not SQL will be an issue because those reads are
always against logical files which manually select the columns desired.
Therefore, as far as the logical knows there will be no record format
level change.

I even played around with ALTER TABLE against the RCO table and added a
few columns and it seemed to have no negative ramifications.

I do realize I will have to document the heck out of this for doing Infor
upgrades. Or stick my ALTER TABLE statements in some source file or
something.

I really do not want to try to keep in sync some matching table.
Especially when the columns I want to add are automatically generated by
the OS. Like Current_User, Current_Timestamp and so forth.

What say ye?


Rob Berendt