The AddressBook table is automatically created for you when you create a new
web application. Its main purpose is to allow you to store additional address information
for the members of your web application, but the AddressBook table is flexible -- you can
also store address information for people who are not members. And
the members of your web application don't necessarily have to have corresponding address
information in the AddressBook.
By default new members of your web application are added to the AddressBook. When you
select the Members tab and click the New Member button to add a new member, you'll see
that the Add new members to AddressBook option is selected by default.
The AddressBook table contains a key field, the UserName field. This field
stores the user name that each member specifies when they register on the
DataWeb.com domain (or any other hosted domain). The UserName field uniquely
identifies the user. If a member is listed in the AddressBook, then each time a
user creates or modifies a record in a table, their user name is recorded in
either the OwnedBy or ModifiedBy system field, respectively. Including members
in the AddressBook is therefore useful for tracking who created and modified
which records.
You can create a special field of type User in any table. A field of type
User is a lookup to the AddressBook table. This field type makes it easy to
incorporate the members of your web application into the data in your table. For example,
for a project management web application, you might create a field of type User that
specifies to which member of the application a particular task is assigned. This way you
don't have to re-enter the names of the members of your web application -- they're already
available in the AddressBook.
