Smarter dialogs

  • Article

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that dialogs for jobs in AX gets more and more complicated. I have a feeling a few of them could solve most of the world’s problems with hunger and pollution, if I could only figure out how fill the dialog fields correctly…

Users need help and guidance with the dialogs and to give the best guidance you may need to react to the choices made by the user in the dialog.

Two methods on RunBase allow you to hook up some events from the dialog form with your RunBase inheriting class:

  • dialogSelectCtrl is executed every time a new control is selected. I.e. when you move from one field to another.
  • dialogTask is executed every time the task method of the dialog form is called.

Here’s an example of how you can enable or disable fields based on what the users selects.

 class dialogTest extends RunBase
{
    DialogField     dialogFieldCustVend;
    DialogField     dialogFieldCustAccount;
    DialogField     dialogFieldVendAccount;
}
public container pack()
{
    return conNull();
}
public boolean unpack(container packedClass)
{
    return true;
}
static void main(args _args)
{
    dialogTest   dialogTest = new dialogTest();
    ;
    dialogTest.prompt();
}
protected DialogRunBase dialog()
{
    DialogRunBase   dialog = super(dialog, true);
    ;
    dialogFieldCustVend = dialog.addField(typeId(NoYesId), "Show vendor?");
    dialogFieldCustAccount = dialog.addField(typeId(CustAccount));
    dialogFieldVendAccount = dialog.addField(typeId(VendAccount));
    // We start out by disabling the VendAccount field
    dialogFieldVendAccount.fieldControl().enabled(false);
    dialog.allowUpdateOnSelectCtrl(true);
    return dialog;
}
public void dialogSelectCtrl()
{
   super();
   
   dialogFieldCustAccount.enabled(dialogFieldCustVend.value() == NoYes::No);
   dialogFieldVendAccount.enabled(dialogFieldCustVend.value() == NoYes::Yes);
}

You may also consider using radio button enabled field groups to control larger groups of fields. You can see an example of this in the AX 4.0 payment generation dialog.

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Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at https://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm