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:

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

Indicating mandatory field in a dialog (RunBase) class.

A classical problem is indicating that a field is mandatory in a dialog, when the field is not bound to a datasource/field in a datasource. Normally fellow developers will tell you that, that is not possible. I found a way to do this. In your Runbase-based class you can implement the putToDialog-method e.g like this: protected void putToDialog() { super(); fieldMask.fieldControl().mandatory(true); } where fieldMask is a DialogField object in your dialog. This will make the field act like it was a mandatory field from a datasource in a form, showing a red-wavy line under the field, and requiring the field to have a value. Attention: Your class has to run on the client.If you set your class to run on the server, you get a run-time error, when the fieldMask.FieldControl()-call is made.
1 comment
Read more

Dynamics ax 2012 traversing selected records in a form data source

A classical developer challenge in Dynamics AX is to enable a form button when multiple records have been selected in the form by the user. This usually involves writing some form of loop (for or while or do-while) that starts out with calling _ds.getFirst() and continuing the loop as long as _ds.getNext() returns a tablebuffer. Well things got a little bit easier in AX 2012. In AX 2012 you can use the MultiSelectionHelper class. One example is the following that I encountered in AX 2012: Can you make the customer collection letter print out run for each selected collection record in the Print/Post collection letters form (Accounts receiveable / Periodic / Collections / Print/Post Collection letters). If we ignore the possibility for setting up print destination for running each report we can do this in two steps: 1) Change the "Multiselect" property of the "MenuButton" and the "Menuitembutton" in the MenuButton in the form from "Auto...
Post a Comment
Read more