Skip to main content

AliasFor property on a tablefield

Ever wonder what the AliasFor property on a table field is used for ?

It is actually a pretty nifty little feature of the AX runtime.

I was tasked with making a solution for the following problem:

* Introduce a new field on the item table that can hold the EAN number of the item.
* Enable the user to be able to type in either the item id OR the EAN number when searching for an item to put on e.g. a sales order line.
* Make sure that the EAN number is shown in the look up lists

This actually quite easy to do.

First I created the EAN number field on the InventTable using a new extended datatype created for that purpose.

Then I created a new index on the InventTable containing the new field. This of course makes for searching for EAN numbers effeciently, but it also makes the EAN number field appear in the lookup list.

The final thing to do was to set the AliasFor property of the new EAN Number field to be an alias for ItemId, by assigning the value ItemId to the property.



Now "magically" the user is able to type in both item id and EAN number in the Item ID field of e.g. a sales order line, or an item journal etc. to get the item number.

So the AliasFor property can be used to enable the user to use more fields as search keys when directly typing in keys in a field.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. SebDraDecember 7, 2010 at 11:47 AM

    Hi there,
    it's not done by "magic"
    after changing an value in a string-edit there will be called the validate-methods
    (validate on the control, validate on the datasource-field and validatefield on the table).
    the validatefield-method on the table first looks for the related field -> is it an existing value
    if not, it will search for an aliasfor-field for the related field and looks for an existing value
    if found, it will replace the original value with the aliasfor-value
    the first hit will be used.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Suppressing the infolog

Supressing the infolog is often useful in D365FO when augmenting code. When augmenting code using COC (Chain Of Command), you can have new code run either before or after the code you are augmenting. This means that any infolog-messages that the standard application code does, will be shown to the user, even if your augmentation supports a scenario where there must be no infolog-messages. How do you avoid the standard application infolog-messages ? To the rescue comes temporary supression of the infolog. The suppression consists of: 1) Saving the current infologLevel 2) Setting the infologLevel to SysInfologLevel::None 3) Run your code 4) Restoring the saved infologLevel to the infolog For example a table could have a validatewrite-method that validates that you are only allowed to use 3 out of 6 options in an enum-field, and you need to allow for a fourth one. Table a - validateWrite method: boolean validateWrite() {     Switch (this.enumField)     {     ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dynamics AX 2012 ValidTimeState tables and form changing view from current to all

Valid Time State tables are new i AX 2012 a gives the developer the possibility to easily create tables that hold e.g. current setup data for various purposes, and at the same time keeping a "history" of the changes of the data in the table. For more reading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg861781.aspx I was tasked with doing a setup table with rates for calculating Vendor Bonus and I chose to base this a valid time state table. The customer asked for a button on the form, where you maintain the vendor bonus calculation setup data, so you could toggle viewing "Current setup" or "All setup" records (changing the view from actual to all records and vice versa in the form). I found that you can not change the ValidTimeStateAutoQuery property on the form data source in a form at run-time. It simply does not change anything, so I came up with the following solution: A boolean class member in the classdeclation method of the form: boolean ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Subtle but important difference between _ds.executeQuery() and ds.Research()

This is actually an old entry. Been tumbling with a problem for the last few days. A form in our Dynamics AX module for Preventive Maintenance Control was not behaving. The form has "explicit" filter fields that the user can see without having to activate the form filter (CTRL+F3), for setting up filters most commonly used in an easy way. And this is working ok. However at this customer site, the form has been adjusted so that the user can have the form refreshed automatically periodically, and when the users at the customer site were making use of the "explicit" filter combined with the AX's normal filtering (CTRL+F3), the form simply threw away the normal form filtering. I discovered a subtle but very important difference between writing _ds.executeQuery(); (which was the way our code was doing it) and _ds.Research(); The difference is that _ds.Research() will retain the filter ranges in the forms query as they are right now. _ds.executeQuery() will NOT. It ...
Post a Comment
Read more