Enum is great way to centralized your list of options in Business Central. You can define an enum, then use the enum on every objects (such as table, page, report, etc) and they will all have the same list of options.
However, what if you want to hide some of the options on specific pages or tables because it is not valid option for them ? It’s a good design to only provide user with only the options that they are allowed to choose.
I was working on a report in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central recently, and the client wanted the report to show a value from an extension that was not a dependency for my customizations app. Because I am lazy efficient, I did not want to go to the trouble of adding an entire separate app as a dependency just to get a single field onto one report. Adding dependencies is a lot of work and requires future maintenance, and it just wasn’t worth it.
I had a difficult time finding an example of this type of API filtering using the OData $filter query option, so I wanted to share an example that I needed for a project.
For context, this is a very simple example of a Business Central API “child array” that I wanted to filter. Technically, I think that OData calls this an “expanded navigation property”.
In this video, I take a look at hash values, how the work and how you can use them in Business Central.
Now we have Enums, but how do we ensure that apps we create with enums are actually extendable? Just because the Enum can be extended does not ensure that the usage of them us truly extendable.
During my AL training classes, a frequently asked question is how to convert enum values to and from integer or text. So I thought it would be a good idea to share with you what possibilities you have.
First of all, we need to understand the properties of an enum. Let’s look at an enum definition and see how it is constructed.
Source : Kauffmann @ Dynamics 365 Business Central
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If you need field values from different tables at runtime within the same function, then there is a nice solution: