Is unique key required for Detail page to work?

I have a results page with a listing of items and when clicking on one of the items to navigate to the details page the same item detail is listed regardless of which item I select. Does DA require that each of the items listed in the results page have a unique key and then use that unique key to display the selected row on the details page?

As a recommendation, the DA documentation should probably be much more clearer on what is required in terms of the database design. I believe that you do in fact have to maintain a unique key on each table if you want to navigate to the details for each item. It's good DB design to do this but I'd like the option to not have to do it in cases where it would be easier to leave it off for reporting purposes.

Yes, you do need to have a unique Primary Key Column in your database to be able to drill down to a specific record.


This is not so much a limitation imposed by DataAssist.

the job of a primary key column is to be a unique identifier for the record to be used by the database for indexing purposes.

With out a primary key column, you will have to use another column to uniquely identify the record for looking up the details, this can become problematic though. Since the database will not be responsible for making sure the value in that column is unique, you could insert duplicate keys. In the case of a detail page, only the first record would be displayed, causing the duplicate top become orphaned.