Extend Constituent Relationship Manager function

Question

HI,

Wonder if anyone here could help us. we are looking at extending the constituent relationship manager function. The Out of the Box table named RELATIONSHIPMANAGER has the following fields

ID
CONSTITUENTID
FUNDRAISERID
ADDEDBYID
CHANGEDBYID
DATEADDED
DATECHANGED
TS
TSLONG

In addition to the above fields we would like to add four more columns to the table

Context
Start Date
End Date
Comments

We have not made any table level customisation yet in our organisations, so this is our first attempt and I wonder if you any of have done anything like this.
My questions are
Can we directly change the underlying table?
If no, I guess we need to create a new user defined table but we will not be able to make use of other OTB functions related to RELATIONSHIPMANAGER. Is there any recommended to method to making changes such as this?

Many thanks in advance
Anbu

Answer 1

Extending a table spec is not supported. The recommended way to do this is to create another table that links to relationship manager. For example, USR_RELATIONSHIPMANAGER_EXT, with the columns ID (same as RELATIONSHIPMANAGER.ID via PrimaryKeyAsForeignKeyTablename metadata) and your additional fields. That way you can take advantage of any OOB functionality and extend that functionality as needed with your new fields.