May want to increase field length on PA52 screen

I have a couple of comments in regard to just increasing the NEW-VALUE (1-36) field to 60.

First the NEW-VALUE field is tied to the ELEMENT NEW-VALUE so any field in other tables tied to the NEW-VALUE element would also be increased. A work around would be to define a custom element for the field to ensure other fields are not changed.

Second, the A-VALUE field in the HRHISTORY table also gets updated by the PERSACTION table. So this field would also need to be increased (and you would also have the same issue relating to the element of the A-VALUE field as described for the NEW-VALUE element described above).

As for enabling the change you are correct in making the change via dbdef, running blddbdict, and dbreorg.

Thanks for the info. HR is aware of the "working as designed" answer from Lawson and since any customization would get wiped out with an update, I am not getting much pressure to "fix" it.

I concur,  increasing the size of NEW-VALUE is a bad idea.  Splitting into user fields wouldn't work well either because they are only 13 chars long.  If it is a COBOL program that creates the PERSACTION, you may just have to update the table directly, or you could trigger a processflow to update HR11, workunit variables can be up to 250 characters long.

Your only recourse is to ask Lawson for enhancement. There are many tables hit by PA52 depending on your ACTION-CODE and REASON. You don't to want to go this way. For anything abnormal situation like long email-address, you can have your feeder program to report such abnormalities to your users and they can enter it manually thru HR11. Here's what I did:
1. Created a processflow that is scheduled every night to get employee information from LDAP.
2. Test data against tables used by PA52. such as EMPLOYEE, HREMPUSF etc
3 Create Email report if anything abnormal like Email-Address, employee id, Status etc
4. If LDAP data not equal to Lawson table then do an update/add using PA52.1