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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.

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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

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