Engineer / Solution Architect / Dynamics 365-AX Technical Consultant / Instructor (MCT)

In my practice, I was asked a number of times to create various application functions that
process user-selected records in a form grid. Regardless of what function is being created, the
first step was always to determine what records were selected by the user.
In this recipe, we explore several ways of achieving this goal. We will modify the Items form
in the Inventory management module by adding a new button to it, which lists currently
selected records in the overview grid.
How to do it…

1. In AOT, open the InventTable form and create a new method with the following code:
void processSelectedItems()
{
InventTable inventTableLocal;
;
for (inventTableLocal = InventTable_ds.getFirst(true) ?
InventTable_ds.getFirst(true) :
InventTable;
inventTableLocal;
inventTableLocal = InventTable_ds.getNext())
{
info(strfmt(

“You’ve selected item ‘%1′”,
inventTableLocal.ItemId));
}
}
2. Add a new Button to the form’s ButtonGroup group:
Property Value
Name ProcessSelectedItems
Text Process
MultiSelect Yes
3. Override its clicked() with the following code:
void clicked()
{;
super();
element.processSelectedItems();
}
4. To test the record selection, open Inventory management | Item Details, select
several records using SHIFT or CTRL and click the Process button. The selected
items should be displayed in the Infolog:

How it works…
The key element in this recipe is a for statement in processSelectedItems(). First, it
checks if more than one record is selected by calling getFirst(true) on the InventTable
form data source. If yes, the for loops all the selected records from the data source,
otherwise it uses the cursor, which corresponds to the currently selected single record. All
selected records are then stored in the local variable inventTableLocal. In this example,
we just output inventory item numbers into the Infolog using the global info() function.
The ProcessSelectedItems button is used to call the function above once the user clicks it.
Notice that its property MultiSelect is set to Yes to ensure it is still enabled when multiple
records are selected.
There’s more…
I have also experienced that sometimes Dynamics AX users struggle to select multiple records
using SHIFT or CTRL. Sometimes, it is not clear that the form itself supports multiple record
processing. In such cases a more convenient way of selecting multiple records could be to add
a new checkbox in front of each record. This would remove all confusion and improve user
experience. In order to implement that, we need to make few changes to the example above.
First, we add a new Map variable to the form’s class declaration:
Map marked;
And in the form’s init() right after the variable declaration section we create its instance:
marked = new Map(Types::Int64, Types::String);
Then, we create a new edit method on the InventTable data source with the following code:
edit boolean editMark(
boolean _set,
InventTable _inventTable,
boolean _mark)
{;
if (_set)
{
if (!_mark)
{
if (marked.exists(_inventTable.RecId))
{
marked.remove(_inventTable.RecId);
}
}

else
{
marked.insert(
_inventTable.RecId,
_inventTable.ItemId);
}
}
return marked.exists(_inventTable.RecId);
}
We also add a new CheckBox to the top of the form’s Grid in the Overview tab page with the
following properties:
Property Value
Name Mark
Label Select
DataSource InventTable
DataMethod editMark
Finally, we have to modify processSelectedItems() to loop though the map. Replace the
method with the following code:
void processSelectedItems()
{
MapEnumerator mapEnumerator;
;
mapEnumerator = marked.getEnumerator();
while (mapEnumerator.moveNext())
{
info(strfmt(
“You’ve selected item ‘%1′”,
marked.lookup(mapEnumerator.currentKey())));
}
}

Open the Items form again and notice that now it has a new checkbox Select in front of
each record. Pick several records using it and click Process. The selected items should be
displayed in the Infolog:
The principle of this technique is that we use a Map type object to store the list of selected
item numbers. The editMarked() method is bound to the checkbox control and is
responsible for adding a record to the map upon user selection and removing it from the map
if the user deselects the checkbox.
We also use the MapEnumerator class to retrieve item numbers from the map for
further processing.

Source

Microtsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Development Cookbook