About the Field Sequence Number

All the fields within a family are assigned a field sequence number, which determines the order in which fields will be displayed, loaded, and processed during certain operations. The default field sequence number is assigned automatically by the GE Digital APM system when a field is created, but you can change the field sequence for a family as needed.

In some cases, field sequence number are inconsequential and do not impact how the system functions. In other cases, particularly in cases where rules are fired, field sequence numbers are important. To make sure that these operations do not result in errors, you should define field sequence numbers for field as appropriate for the rules that exist for that family.

For example, consider a family that contains fields A, B, and C, each of which is formatted to display a list of valid values. Now, suppose that rules have been written for the field to specify that the value selected in list A determines the available values in list B, and the value selected in list B determines the value selected in list C. On the datasheet, where you have control over the order in which fields are displayed, you can specify that list A should appear first, then list B, and finally list C. This would encourage users to select a value first from list A, then from list B, and finally list C, causing all the rules to be fired in the intended order.

In operations where you do not have control over the order in which fields are processed, however, you must rely upon field sequence numbers. In this example, you would want to set the field sequence numbers such that field A would be processed first, followed by B, and then by C.

Operations in which field sequence numbers are used include when:

Fields are processed during an import or export.
A record is moved from one family to another via a GE Digital APM plug-In for DataStage job.

Note: Only one field sequence number can be defined for each field. This means that you will need to define field sequence numbers that are appropriate for visual and functional purposes. If you modify field sequence numbers to adjust a certain display, keep in mind the impact of those changes on the loading and processing of data.