Delete or Inactivate a Customer

A user asked:

“Is it possible to delete a customer out of LIMS? I see you can make them inactive.”

You can use Edit | Delete Record on most setup screens to delete a record including a customer. However, if you receive a message that “The record cannot be deleted because table … includes related records” then the record can’t be deleted because of the ‘referential integrity’ rules defined in the LimsData database.

For example, you cannot delete a customer if you have logged at least one sample for the customer. Deleting the customer would create an ‘orphan’ sample record. That is the purpose of the Inactive field on most setup screens. Inactivate the customer to prevent further use. You can still query samples for inactive items but you cannot log new samples for inactive records since they won’t appear in the pick list.