Hi all,



Is it possible to specified or exclude the fields to be included in a BrowseDialog?



Since a Browse Dialog is assigned to a BO I believe that it will bring all fields in the BO, how to exclude a couple of fields in the SELECT statement so only the ones needed are used in the SELECT Field1, Field2, Field3, etc.?

Edhy Rijo

Forgot to mention that I know I can create a view for this but is there another way to get this done?, I prefer not to use a view and handle this by code if possible.

Edhy Rijo

Edhy -



Hello.



So, you can control the fields that the BD shows to the user as search fields, as well as the ones that are displayed in the resulting list once the user performs a search.



I guess I am a bit confused (which probably means I will learn something here) as to what the goal is. When the BO that is to be populated from the BD is populated, it will use only those columns that it needs, even if the BD contains additional ones (as when a view is used to override the source of the BD). Are you asking this from a performance point of view?




________________
_____/ Regards,
____/ al

Hi Alex,



Based on my testing, you are wrong, the Browse Dialog will use all the fields in the BO as part of the SELECT statement.



When you create a BO and assign it to a BrowseDialog, all the fields in the BO will be use as part of the SELECT statement. In my case I have a Transactions table which have a couple of VARCHAR(MAX) and VARBINARY(MAX) fields, these are only used in a specific form, but the Transactions table is used in many forms, so when customer use a browse dialog, this process is slowed because those (MAX) fields are included in the main transactionsBO.



I am almost sure that the only way around this is using a View to define the specifics fields needed in most cases and then create a BO using this view. I just wanted to make sure there was no other way to avoid having to create the view and maintain it

Edhy Rijo

Aren't there some events you can use to manipulate the SQL being sent?

I looked at the Searching event, but it does handle the "WHERE" not the fields included or excluded from the BO.

Edhy Rijo

I'm not seeing anything either Edhy that would allow the fields included in the select to be manipulated.

Thanks Greg for the confirmation.



I am going with the View route and will do some testing soon, just that I need to do several changes since I want this to be used in all BDs.

Edhy Rijo

Ok here my conclusion, a view should be used and in this case of refactoring the source BO for the Browse Dialog it was worthy because in the BrowseResultLayout I need to show some calculated fields which I created using Custom Field Properties and those where also slowing things down a bit, so I decided to create my BrowserDialog view with a JOIN condition to get the calculated fields in a single trip and now getting and showing the data in the Browse Dialog is much faster and responsive.



One caveat to take into consideration using this approach is that after the user selects the record to work with from the BD, I them have to search that PK in the primary BO used in the form which in this case is not the one used in the BD. I know this can be confusing sometimes but in my case it works just fine because searching a record using the BO.FillByPrimaryKey(PKValue) is much faster than looking for many records in the BD which will include those VarBinary or Varchar fields that are not used in the BD.



Hey Alex, hope all this makes sense and if not, please let us know.

Edhy Rijo

( I'm posting this without thinking it through completely so bear with me if it turns out to be complete nonsense )



For some reason I assumed that if the fill method of a BO did not return all the columns it would generate an error. This doesn't seem to be the case. I just dropped a bo on a form that has a number of Varchar fields etc and in the parentformloading just did a filldatatable to get four columns, excluding varchar, varbinary etc. and I got a cursor.



Couldn't you to that for the BD and then use a different instance of the BO with a full column fill method to get a single chosen record with fillbyprimarykey (or for that matter a set of records)