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When you make On the Fly (OTF) items they don’t have an Asset ID. Hence "On The Fly", not registered with the data base. However an OTF Asset can be designated as Does Return or Will not Return.
We just discovered that BOTH types of OTF were placed in the sort category, "Other" on the Include screen. Which meant that if a User elected to re-purpose a prior OTF item, including it in a second Project, and selected an OTF designated as Will not Return all manner of not so nice things happened in the data base and on several reports. Since the OTF item never really returned from the first Project... it was not really there... you can see the conundrum this could cause a data base not schooled in temporal mechanics. (Time Travel for the non-Sci-Fi fans.).
So why were you allowed to select it a second time you might logically ask?. We asked ourselves exactly the same question once I entered two OTF items on the same Project and named them DOES NOT RETURN & WILL RETURN. Imagine our surprise!
One might hope for a bit of forgiveness when you consider this was not entirely apparent as my experiment as most OTF items were named things like Pallet 01 or BOX2. And our original code did not understand there being two types of OTF as that was a relatively recent update to accommodate a specific site’s business needs.
Note: A fringe benefit is that you won’t have to scroll past that ever growing list of unused “Other” items to get to the real Assets on the Include screen any more.
