Two different viewpoints from two different developers, so I'm curious where support stands on this. I understand it is better if you needed to do a custom application that needed to store data, it is recommended to create new tables, so in the event of an update, a modification to an existing table doesn't create a problem. I get it.

But if one needs to store just a small piece of information, and one is extremely careful to create custom fields, with a custom naming convention, onto an existing table, one should be okay with this. As an example, if I create a custom table I will prefix my custom table with "ct_", which stands for custom table , just like Ablecommerce prefixes their tables with "ac_".

This would prevent my custom table from interfering in the event of an update, I also have a naming convention for custom fields that I need to insert inside an Ablecommerce existing table, they start with "cf_" for custom fields.

This way in the event of a database schema update, it will be extremely difficult for Ablecommerce to have a problem with any of my custom fields, unless they reference certain table fields by their position in the table, which is not very smart thing to do.

I fall in the latter group, where I will manipulate an existing table with my own custom field to reduce the amount of coding involved. So I'm just curious what support or some of the heavy duty developers on this forum think about this.

Thank you

Not modifying an AC table was received wisdom from the beginning of time, so maybe it's not crucial anymore.I think we got into the habit of not modifying AC tables, maybe partly because we've only had one client who needed to purchase AC source code so we haven't modified AC data access code, just added our own data access code for additional tables.
http://forums.ablecommer...to+database+table#p63163
http://forums.ablecommer...to+database+table#p57556