#MSDYNGP Extender View Involving Extender Window/Form – Strange “Add Link” Issue & Reason.


Firstly, I am not sure whether I should categorise this as an issue. Let me explain this with an example.

For illustrative purpose, my requirement is to assign an additional information to customers. In addition to Country Code, I would like to assign from which continent a customer is from.

First step; to create an Extender Form named Continent Maintenance in which I will maintain list of continents. I do not need anything information other than an ID (Continent ID) and a name (Name); as shown below:

Snip20140114_1

Note that there are no fields apart from ID and Description.

Second step; I am going to create an Extender Window for Customer Maintenance (Cards -> Sales -> Customer -> Additional -> Continent) to assign a continent to a customer. Extender Window definition is as follows:

Snip20140114_2

Third step; is to check whether things are properly done and confirm. Let me open Customer Maintenance and see if I can access this new Extender information:

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Perfect. Let’s now get into the actual issue.

I would like to create a view to retrieve customer continent information. To achieve this, I would like to link Assign Continent (Extender Window) with Continent Maintenance (Extender Form) to get the continent name. Ideally, my view should retrieve following:

Customer ID, Continent ID, Continent Name

Now, when I try to create an Extender View linking my Extender Window and Form, I end up facing below issue:

Snip20140114_4

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Did you see that? I do not have my Extender Form fields shown here. I have two fields; Continent ID and Name. Where are they? Why are they not shown here? Shouldn’t it be available for me to link with my Extender Window’s Continent ID?

REASON: If your Extender Form DOES NOT have any other field than an ID and a Description (in my case, Continent ID and Name), ADD LINK To Field will not list out the ID and Description fields.

Is that the actual reason? Let’s confirm by adding another field to Extender Form as follows:

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After adding above field, Additional Info., look at my Extender View Add Link now:

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Did you see that? They are available now. AFTER adding a field in addition to default ID and Description fields.

And I am not sure how many have ever noticed this. I am noticing it for the first time now. I haven’t created any form with only ID and Description till now. I had to spend 4 hours to identify this reason, honestly. Had no idea whatsoever.

Those who are going to deal with Extender views with form(s) having ONLY ID and Description fields, save your 4 hours. 🙂

VAIDY

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Where is my Extender Detail Window in Extender 2013?


With Extender 2013, we have whole lot of surprises on how it got enhanced. One biggest enhancement/change to Extender is the way it treats Extender Detail Window (that is the name till previous version).

Previous version’s Detail Window definition looked as follows:

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Not any more… There is no such option called Detail Window. From now on, every window is called, well simply, a Window.

So where is the option to setup whether it’s a multiple row entry (grid) or not? Here it is:

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Just select option “Display scrolling grid” and you are good to go.

Clearly, eOne developers have done an immense cleanup work on Extender’s design. Overall, classification of Extender resources itself is now shrunken as follows:

Snip20130321_5   Snip20130321_6

Interesting changes; I have not gone thru’ all changes/enhancements yet. I will be posting more on all those interesting and critical changes.

So far, thumbs up to eOne Team, for their efforts.

VAIDY