AutoCalcField – What’s that?

There are so many properties and functions available in Navision that its impossible to learn them completely in few years. Some of them are complex but most of them are simple and we simply unknowingly use them.

You would have been amazed knowing some of the properties which you use quite regularly but never bothered about knowing them. In this series of posts, we will try to under few of them. Today we will start with ‘AutoCalcField

You all know that if you display a flow field onto a form or a report, the system calculates the flow field value automatically and displays it. Do you know why system behaves like this? Just because of the property ‘AutoCalcField‘.

This simple property is related to any control onto a form or a report which displays a flow field. In other words, you can change this property in those controls whose source expression is a flow field.

Why we don’t really notice them? Because ‘Yes’ is the default value for this property. If you turn it to ‘No’, the control simply will not calculate the flow field value automatically.

To check it out, open the Vendor card (form 26) in design mode and go to the property of the field “Balance (LCY)”. You will find, the AutoCalcField property is set to ‘TRUE’ by default. You can change it to ‘No’ and see whether this field is anymore displaying the Vendor Balances or not.

Good Luck.

See you in Next property 🙂

Do you want to keep a flow field editable on a form or in a table?

Let’s try it.

Say we will make ‘Balance (LCY)’ field in Customer card editable and test it. In Customer card, the textbox control is already editable and it is inheriting the ‘Editable = No’ property of the field from the customer tables.

Let’s make the ‘Balance (LCY)’ field editable in Customer table.

Select the field > Properties > Editable > Yes

Once this is done, the textbox displaying ‘Balance (LCY)’ in Customer card will become editable and you can put new amount in this field.

Right now, the calculated amount (coming from Detailed Cust. Ledger Entry) is shown as 73,810.00.

Let’s modify it to 80000.00 (an increase of 6,190.00)

So what will happen now. Your customer card is showing a value of 80000.00 whereas your detailed customer ledger entry table have entries of amount 73,810.00 only. is your data customer entries become inconsistent?

Not really. Navision never allows inconsistent data in flow fields. The system will simply will lookout some way to make the data consistent. It simply insert a new entry in ‘Detailed cust. ledger entry’ to adjust the inconsistent data.

Here, look at the detailed cust. ledger entry and you can see a new entry having an amount of 6,190.00. This new entry makes the total 80000.00 (now consistent)

Pretty dangerous! What do you think? To avoid this, you need to keep your flow field always ineditable.

But having seen the above incidence, can you think about any scenario, where this particular feature / rather drawback can be very useful?

Let me know if you find something interesting.