Thursday, December 14, 2006

VendAccountItemLookup Form


During our implementation, one of the engineers on our functional team brought it to my attention that a particular lookup did not show vendor names next to their account numbers and the lookup needed to be modified. After a couple of hours of trying to determine where the lookup was located, a technician from Microsoft was able to point me to the correct form.

The form is 'vendaccountitemlookup'. This form is used in different areas of AX for use as the vendor field lookup form. So far, I have found it in 'Planned Orders' form within Master Planning and within Inventory Management under the 'References'. I will also place an example screenshot at the bottom of this post.

The problem our engineer had was that the lookup form has three tabs: 'All Vendors', 'According to Trade Agreements', and 'According to External Item Descriptions'. The 'All Vendors' tab only has the Vendor's Name field in it. If you click over to the 'According to Trade Agreements' or 'According to External Item Descriptions', you only see the vendor's account number. Now if you hold your cursor over the field long enough, you get the automated help text, but it disappears after a few seconds. I'm not sure why this wasn't existing functionality, but I am working on modifying this form to include the Vendor name joined to the proper vendor account number for the respective account number in each tab.

The AX Development Team was able to set this field's lookup simply by including the form name in the 'FormHelp' property of the Extended Data Type that represents the Vendor Account field, which in this case the EDT is 'ItemPrimaryVendId'.

I apparently missed this somewhere in the documentation I have read for AX as this being a possibility for assigning a lookup form to a field. To date, I have either coded my lookups dynamically using the systemlookup form within a lookup() method or I have performed it through an autolookup. As you can see this functionality will allow you to create powerful lookups that can even be multi-tabbed.

(VendAccountItemLookup Form)


Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

1 comment:

Sven Jochimsen said...

Hi there dave,
as you have found the reason is that the tables in the other tabs do not include the name field.

Having done some similar stuff I would suggest creating a view for each tab with appropriate fields, as display fields present performance challenges :-).

/Sven