To work with a generic inquiry or report, you need to find the data access classes and data fields that underlie the key elements on the relevant data entry form or forms. To do this, you inspect these user interface elements.
For detailed descriptions of data access classes used by Acumatica ERP, look for the needed DAC in the DAC Schema Browser. (For details about the DAC Schema Browser, see Data from Multiple Data Sources: DAC Schema Browser.)
In this chapter, you will learn how to inspect UI elements to find the underlying data fields.
You may need to discover DACs when you are responsible for the customization of Acumatica ERP in your company, and you need to modify an existing generic inquiry or report to better meet the needs of a particular group of users or all users. Before you start to modify the inquiry or report, you need to find out what DACs store the data that you want to modify. For this purpose, you need to inspect the needed UI elements.
You usually create or modify a generic inquiry or report to retrieve data related to some business purpose, so you know which data you need to retrieve. Thus, you have to explore which data access classes and data fields you can use to access this data.
To find the underlying data access classes and fields, you explore the forms related to the needed data. For example, suppose that you want to find the data field that holds the reference number of a sales order. When you save a sales order on the Sales Orders (SO301000) form, the system assigns a reference number to it. To find out which data class and data field correspond to the sales order reference number, you open this form, press Ctrl+Alt and click the Order Nbr. element on the form (see Item 1 below).
As an alternative, you can click Settings > Inspect Element on the form title bar and then click the needed UI element.
The Element Properties dialog box opens. You are interested in the values in the Data Class and Data Field boxes (Item 2), which correspond to the data access class and data field you need to specify when you modify the generic inquiry or report.
If you are inspecting an element with a drop-down control (see Item 1 below), you can also view the list of values for the element. To do this, in the Element Properties dialog box, you click the Drop-Down Values button (Item 2) and the system displays the Drop-Down Values dialog box (Item 3). In the dialog box, you can review the list of options available for the drop-down control. The Value column lists the values stored in the database, and the Description column lists the corresponding captions that are displayed on the user interface. You use the values from the Value column in complex conditions and in formulas in generic inquiries and reports.
You can get more information about the data access class structure and its data fields by using the functionality of the Element Properties dialog box (see Item 1 below).
In the dialog box, you can click the link with the data access class name (Item 2). The system opens the DAC Schema Browser in a new browser tab with information about the selected data access class (Item 3). For more information about the DAC Schema Browser, see Data from Multiple Data Sources: DAC Schema Browser.
The full name of any data access class consists of the namespace and the class name. For example, PX.Objects.AR.ARPayment is the full name of the data access class that holds information about accounts receivable payments, where PX.Objects.AR is the namespace and ARPayment is the class name.
PX.Objects.AR
ARPayment
For each data access class, you can specify a shortened version of the name used to designate the table. For example, ARPayment can be used as the alias for the PX.Objects.AR.ARPayment data access class.
You use aliases to specify (on other tabs of the form) which data access class the system will use to access a data field for a generic inquiry.
The following screenshot shows the list of data access classes and their aliases for the SO-SalesOrder generic inquiry (with the Sales Orders site map title).