I have a situation where I want to use a hypen in a value in a dropdown list. I have an on-site installation and I'm using this field value in the Sugar database to join to an external database table. So, I need the dropdown item name to include the hypen, not just the label. The hypen character is not allowed in the database item name in the dropdown editor.
To be specific, I've got a guy named Alan-Dee. In the display label part of the dropdown, Alan-Dee is fine, but you can't use Alan-Dee in the dropdown item name because the hyphen is not allowed. So, we have to enter it as AlanDee or Alan_Dee. Unfortunately, we use this column in the sugar table to join to an external database user table - where his name is Alan-Dee - so, the join doesn't work.
My option is to either change every report and process that joins to this field to handle the name mismatch, or try to fix the data in Sugar. My preference would be to fix it in sugar if possible since it would otherwise have to be changed in 20+ places.
I can come up with various ways to update the value in the sugar accounts_cstm table to be what I want, but once it no longer matches the dropdown value, it won't show in the Sugar UI. Is there a way to bypass the dropdown editor and directly update the value in the file system to be what I need? ("Alan-Dee" instead of "Alan_Dee") I would be gambling that there is no real reason why a hyphen can't be used in a dropdown value. I have a sandbox system where I could test this.
I don't know where or how dropdown lists are actually stored. Can anyone tell me either that this is worth trying, or that it's a harebrained idea that should forgotten altogether?
