Question About Lack of Database-Level Foreign Key Constraints in OpenEMR

[adunsulag (Stephen Nielson)]

If you search foreign keys on the forum you’ll see a couple of posts about this topic. This is a good discussion I did back in 2019 about it.

Database Schema Documentation

@stephenwaite So a foreign key is a database integrity construct that prevents your database system from getting out of wack. Here is a sample table from another application I develop. You can see the foreign keys on assignmentitem_id, last_updated_by, company_id, assignment_id, and created_by. [image] In this case I can’t delete my Company record (referenced by company_id) until all of my ReportFiles have properly been deleted. Otherwise I’d have orphaned records. Same with the other ta…

I started down that path but stopped as there were more pressing projects that needed to be implemented.