Question about flowfields

Business Central/NAV User Forum
1

I am trying to figure out how two calculations are being calculated from (what tables)

Job Quantity — Item. Job Qty Remaining

and

Need – Qty. on Planning Lines

Thanks

2

If they are flow fields you can look at the CalcFormula property. Otherwise you’d need to use the Developer’s Toolkit and / or Debugger to find all the instances where those fields are assigned values.

3

Can you point me in the direction of a good NAV debugger tutorial. Do I need a developer license to use the debugger?

4

You know Sean… you come in here (and mibuso - http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=49253) complaining how difficult everything is and how much easier other technologies are, but you don’t seem to listen to the advice that you are getting.

Remember back in May, when you posted your first question on this forum, and you were told to download the training material for NAV developers? If you had actually taken the time to really learn about the NAV development environment, like we told you, you would have learned about something called flowfields, and you would have been able to figure out how those two fields work yourself.

I think we all understand that you are a very busy person and that you might not have the time to spend really educating yourself on how stuff works. I also understand that you might be used to other technologies, and working with NAV is outside your comfort zone. Could you do us a favor though, and stop bitching about NAV when it is really YOU that doesn’t take the time to learn. Once you learn how stuff works you will find that you can actually be extremely productive in NAV. Just ask the question, and dispense with the editorial, and we will all be happy to help you out.

What is it that you need to know? The title says “C/AL Symbol Menu”, you are asking about a couple of fields without mentioning the table, and you complain about how difficult it is to export to Excel. Tell us exactly what you need and we’ll be happy to help you out.

6

Yes you are right i have not completed all the tutorials on Customer Source in the past 4 months I thought i would have completed by this time. I am extremely busy and learning this vast program on the side. I don’t understand exporting to excel, everywhere I look people are point to examples NOT a step by step walk through where I can understand the code as it develops!! I understand the flow fields but i want to target these flow field details to make sure what is is calculating is taking in to account everything (I think it might help as this report is what manufacturing uses, it was developed by our partner, and I wanted to understand the guts of the report) you ask me to tell you what tables they are coming from , thats a good freaking question I am trying to figure that out also. Yes, when i learn NAV it will greatly improve my productivity since the program is "smart’ understanding the business and using flow fields instead of using a crap load of joins. What do you want me to do sit here and not ask questions, never sleep and read NAV every waking second until I am an expert and i can talk down to people - like you seem to enjoy doing?

7

I’m not talking down to anyone, I just don’t like people coming in here and complain about something without taking responsibility for THEIR part in their problem. Your problem isn’t that NAV is such a difficult product but you can’t spend enough time on it to learn how it works and your company is apparently not willing to engage the NAV partner. Once you acknowledge that, we can move on from the whining and complaining and get down to what you really need.

Now like you I am very busy, and I do not have the time to search all 937 tables of the standard database (and that’s just 2009 R2, don’t even know what version you are on). I want to help, but you gotta give me a little more to go by. Explain the details of your problem and ask a directed question.

If you need urgent/immediate attention then call your partner.

8

To figure out a flowfield:

  • Design the table. Let’s take table 27, the Item table
  • Move your cursor to a flowfield. Neither one of the fields you mentioned are in the Item table, so I’ll look at field 71, “Purchases(Qty.)”
  • Open the properties page (Alt+V, P or from the View menu, or Shift+F4) and note the ‘FieldClass’ and ‘CalcFormula’ properties
  • If it’s a flowfield, then the FieldClass property will say… Flowfield
  • The definition of the flowfield is in the CalcFormula property, and you can click the ellipsis button to drill in.
  • In this case it’s a sum flowfield, that sums the “Invoiced Quantity” from the “Item Ledger Entry” table, based on certain filters
    To figure out which table a variable points to, open the globals from the C/AL editor and search for the variable. If it’s a local, then do the same with local variables, and you’ll need your cursor to be inside the function where the variable is used.
9

The Dimensions chapter in the Dev II manual goes into great detail of how the debugger works. You don’t need a developer license to use the debugger.