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Flexible record lookup in Business Central

Lookup any Record, from any Table

Daniel Gorski
Daniel Gorski 07. Juni 2023
2 Min. Lesezeit

Have you ever wondered if you could create more flexible lookups? Maybe you have a function where the user is required to select a record from a specific table, depending on the situation?

As an example, let’s create a copy function for sales document comments.

Page.RunModal(0,Rec) is providing a hidden "feature". The compiler does not allow you to pass something like a RecordRef into the function, but it does allow you to pass a variant. And the most interesting thing is that the Variant will contain the value of the last record selected, when “RunModal = Action:LookUp” evaluates to true.

So, for example, we can apply a filter to a RecordRef (or the actual Record) according to the document type and pass the filtered record into a Variant. If we don’t need any pre applied filters, we just open the RecordRef or pass an unfiltered Record into the Variant.

For simplicity, we choose the RecordRef approach here, since the enumeration ordinals of “Sales Comment Document Type” conveniently match those of the “Sales Document Type” for the unposted documents.

AL code for the SelectRecord procedure that opens a RecordRef filtered by document type and returns the selected record's value through Page.RunModal and a Variant

This function enables us to quickly write a multi table lookup, returning the Document No. of the chosen Document Type.

Animated demo of the Copy Comments action: picking Order as the source document, then switching the target type to Posted Invoice and choosing a record from the Posted Sales Invoices lookup

The full source code of “Copy Sales Comments” can be found in our GitHub Repository.

https://github.com/byndit/BeyondAL

Related posts

how-to
development
business central
lookup
recordref
variant
sales comments
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