ArcherPoint Dynamics NAV Developer Digest - vol 83
The ArcherPoint technical staff—made up of developers, project managers, and consultants – is constantly communicating internally, with the goal of sharing helpful information with one another.
As they run into issues and questions, find the answers, and make new discoveries, they post them companywide on Yammer for everyone’s benefit. We in Marketing watch these interactions and never cease to be amazed by the creativity, dedication, and brainpower we’re so fortunate to have in this group—so we thought, wouldn’t it be great to share them with the rest of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Community? So, the ArcherPoint Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Digest was born. Each week, we present a collection of thoughts and findings from the ArcherPoint staff. We hope these insights will benefit you, too.
Question from Michael Heydasch on Table Filters:
We are helping a client that sorely misses the “table filters” capability in Classic, where you select the icon on the toolbar to show a window where you can enter multiple filters, then select OK and all the filters are applied. The keyboard shortcut was Ctrl+F7. When you bring the window up again, it “remembers” the filters currently in place. The client used this feature heavily but is upgrading to RTC. In the RTC, using out-of-the-box functionality, you show the filter pane, but the field selection process is cumbersome and if you have several filters, it ties up a lot of screen real estate.
I found a solution online and got it working, but it only supports hardcoded fields at present, meaning once the user shows the table filter window, the same 7 fields are listed. It won’t allow dynamic selection of other fields. When the user selects OK to close the window, the filters they’ve entered are then applied to the list page. I estimate it would take me some time to give the user the ability to select ANY field in this window, then remember to show this field and its accompanying filter when they next launch the window. The other solution suggested was adding some boxes at the top of the page and allowing them to enter filters that way, but again it (1) ties up screen real estate and (2) supports only preselected fields. Has anyone done anything on the RTC to mimic the table filter capability from Classic? Apparently this is causing the client a *great* deal of consternation.
Suresh Kulla: Michael, do they want this table filter on every page or only for specific pages? I believe the filter pane they are looking for is something like what you get when you click filter on the subform pages, correct?
Michael Heydasch: Thanks Suresh. They want the capability on specific pages. Yes, that’s correct. Crystal Tollison asks, why can’t they apply the filters, then “Save View As”? An excellent question. The answer is because they are constantly changing the filters, looking for specific embedded values in multiple fields. Too many variations to do it this way, too constraining. So a brand new suggestion for the client is to make a subpage where the user can click the “Filters” and bring up the window. It even “remembers” the filters previously suggested, and it has the keyboard shortcut Shift+F3. It will still take some work to make the parent and child play nicely together on the Planning Worksheet, and this is not a universal solution that could apply to any list page. Too bad we don’t have the ability to launch this window from a standard list page. Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and time spent.
Figure 1. Applying filters to the Planning Worksheet.
Rick Dill: Just one more thought that is available from standard NAV: There is the ability to “SAVE VIEW”, which will create a menu option for that list page, with the fields and the values that were selected saved to the List Page menu option. This is the closest thing that I have found to the old Table Filter. So for example; if the client wants to look up customers, and they want to filter on 5 fields, they would:
- Go to the customer list page
- Show the Filter pane
- Set the filters for ANY field on the Customer card.
- Use the SAVE VIEW to save this list page as a menu option.
Now, to go into the filtered list of customers, you just click that option on the Navigation pane. They can add more filters each time, but they will be temporary unless that view is saved again. The filter pane can be reduced once the filters are set.
Jon Long: “Saved Views” are one of the most under rated features of RTC, in my experience. Every time I show a client how to save views, their level of satisfaction goes up a notch.
Bill Warnke on new features in Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services:
Microsoft has slowly been adding great new features to Visual Studio Team Services. One of them is code search: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/vs/alm/Search/overview
Right now this only works on the master branches so it’s not able to search in our release folders just yet. I used this last night to check to see if any of the 15+ Cumulative Updates to 2015 had any changes to a couple line of code that I thought looked suspect. I did a search on an object text file and was able to quickly look at every single Cumulative Update and even the 2016 code base to see if there had been any changes. I can see this being a great addition to a curated solution repository.
My first thought with code search was that it would be useful to help track down those MICR checks.
“MICR” AND file:xxx* <- Find any report having anything to do with MICR.
Kyle Hardin’s Sneaky Code Trick of the Day: Codeunit 419 is your bestest bestie friend
Just look at all those cool functions for file handling, moving files in between clients and service tiers, blob importing and exporting, zip compressed archives – hours of fun and entertainment!
Of course, it also fun to declare your own dotnet variables for system.io.file, but c419 is awesome for saving time.
If you are interested in NAV development, check out our collection of NAV Development Blogs.
For step-by-step instructions on how to perform specific tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, see our collection of How-To blogs.
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