Temporal columns

We are currently faced with the following request:

“Select a record through a lookup and provide the possibility to overrule certain settings from this selected (and now linked) record.”

The client wants to see just the actual values, but wants to see whether this is an original value from the linked record or if this is manually changed (and thus overruled) value.

There is currently no pattern of achieving this, so we are thinking in the following direction:

• Have calculated fields in which the values from the linked record are stored (also used for triggering conditional layout);
• Having fields in which the overruled (if any) values are stored (these are the only ones that need to be stored in the database);
• Having fields that the user can see and change, but that are not stored in the database. These contain either the original value from the linked record or the overruled value.
• A default procedure will determine whether the values from these last fields will be seen as overruled (and need to be stored) or original (and should not be stored);
• An alternative could be having checkboxes for each of these overridable fields that also don't need to be stored. These will then determine which fields (original or overridable) will be presented through a layout procedure.

For this reason we want the option to add fields to a table that will not be stored in the database (similar to calculated columns), but can be changed by the user.

Using a view will bring to much overhead.