Dexterity: Cannot See Table Buffer Values in 10.0 SP5 or 2010 SP1

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Patrick Roth - Click for blog homepageA long standing pain point for ISV's has been the inability to see 3rd party table buffers while debugging ISV code in runtime.

Most development - I assume - is in test mode where your customization and Dynamics are on a level playing field and the ISV can see anything they like easily.

However for any type of 3rd party integration - be it Smartlist, Project Accounting, or Field Service - Dexterity developers (should) know that you cannot test these in test mode, you must test them in runtime using runtime debugging.

And this all works great until you need to check the value of a non-Dynamics table buffer.  And here is where the fun stops - the Table Buffers window in Dexterity only shows the core Dynamics tables.

While a "known issue" forever - this was brought up at last years Developer Conference as a pain point and was looked at getting into the 10.0 SP5 and 11.0 SP1 Dexterity releases where the issue was addressed.

Unfortunately what ended up happening was that we broke the Table Buffer window functionality altogether.  Now what we see in runtime and test mode for these versions is an empty table buffer window.

Normally when the window opens, the Forms DDL is filled in and the Tables DDL is selected from the list for that given form.  In these Dexterity/Runtime versions, the Forms list is not populated and therefore a table cannot be selected rendering the window unusable.

This issue will be corrected in Dexterity 2010 SP2 which will be delivered sometime in H1 of calendar year 2011.  As there are no more scheduled (at this time - subject to change) service packs for 10.0, Development is looking at a means of potentially delivering a hotfix Dexterity release that would fix only this issue.  We'll have to see how this shakes out.

In the meantime, the only solutions that I see are:

  1. Develop and test in test mode under 10.0 SP4 and 2010 RTM if possible
  2. Depending on circumstances, the table value you are looking for might be visible in the Locals window
  3. In Dexterity/Dynamics 2010, you should be able to specify the table field in the Watch window to see a specific table field value

Best Regards,
Patrick Roth
Developer Support