We have always stressed that the AyaNova database schema / metadata should not be modified or it will be unsupportable.
We’ve encouraged developers to use the AyaNova database only through the developers API for safety. In the course of support it has come to our attention that some people are creating their own tables and modifying the existing tables in AyaNova’s database directly for the purposes of developing integration applications for AyaNova.
These changes have caused their AyaNova to break.
To protect end users from unauthorized changes and to ensure we can continue to provide free technical support, we have been forced to add code to ensure that the AyaNova database is not modified outside of the tools we provide in order to ensure that there are no problems for users in future and that their AyaNova remains supportable.
A “fingerprint” is taken of the AyaNova database and compared to a fingerprint of how it should be if it has not been modified by anyone but ourselves in the normal course of updates. If the fingerprints do not match, AyaNova will not start. This is enforced at the lowest levels so no AyaNova utilities will start and neither will any applications that make use of the AyaNova business object API.
There is absolutely no need to make modifications to the AyaNova database schema for developers, we provide an integration object within the developers API itself for the specific purpose of storing 3rd party application data inside the AyaNova database if required or developers can use a separate database for any data they need to store for their applications.
If you have reason to believe that your AyaNova database has any tables or database columns created in it that were not provided by us, or any columns or tables that came with it modified in any way you will need to ensure that those changes are reverted before upgrading to AyaNova 5 or AyaNova will not run on that database.
We will be happy to provide any support you require to get your database cleaned up, no questions asked, simply email support for assistance.