Tuesday, December 11, 2012

SmartFill Object Advanced Settings

Written By Jim Peliksza, Developer at Rockton Software.

There are some circumstances where you may want to alter the SmartFill’s default behavior.  For this reason, we have exposed a few advanced, object-level settings that may be of use to you.


In older builds of SmartFill by Rockton Software, these settings were visible on the SmartFill Object Maintenance Details window, which you see when you open an object definition from the SmartFill Objects window.  To make room for the new Preview area, and to reduce general clutter and improve usability, these settings were moved to a separate window.  You can access this window by clicking the Advanced button, as shown below:


 We will now describe each setting and when you would use them.

Open Lookup on Exactly One Match 
Selecting this checkbox will cause SmartFill’s lookup window (titled, “Make a Selection”) to open even if only one match was found.

Here’s an example of when you would want to use this option: let’s say you enter “blue” as a search, hoping to find a blue phone.  However, as it turns out, the only blue item in the system is a blue widget.  SmartFill’s default behavior will be to automatically select the blue widget because that was the one and only match.

Unfortunately, this is not what we want.  Since no blue phones were displayed in the results list, it means that we probably need to select a different color phone, not a blue widget. On many windows it may not be simple to “undo” the selection of the blue widget and look for another phone because the ID field will now be locked.

If you find situations where this happens a lot with a given object, you may want to use the Open Lookup on Exactly One Match setting so that the SmartFill lookup window will open instead.  This will give you the option of cancelling the lookup window, and allow you to enter a new search value that will get you a list of items that better match what you were initially looking for.

Prompt to Add on Zero Matches
By default, when SmartFill by Rockton Software (www.rocktonsoftware.com) attempts to do a lookup, if it does not find any matches it will do whatever the original window would have done if SmartFill was not installed.  In most cases, when you type in an ID value that does not exist, GP will either just give you an error message, or it will prompt you to enter a new record with that ID.

However, on some windows this is not the case.  An example that comes to mind is the Sales Transaction Entry window.  On this window, if you enter an Item Number that does not exist, it is treated as a non-inventory item number.  Since you don’t get any message that this has happened, you may end up accidentally using a non-inventory Item Number on a transaction when you really were just searching for an inventory item.

Selecting this checkbox will give you two options when no results are found: 1) use the default GP behavior, or 2) cancel the lookup so that you can make changes to the value you originally entered.  This solves the problem above because you will now always know when a search value that you typed returns no results.

Search With Each Token
We will define a “Token” as an individual word separated by a space in the search value.  For instance, if you typed “blue widget” into an ID field, then “blue” and “widget” are each considered “tokens.”

Normally, if the Search With Each Token box is not checked, and you typed “blue widget” as a search value, SmartFill would search for matches of “blue widget”.  Only results where these exact eleven characters are found will be displayed.

However, if this box is checked, then the two tokens are treated individually when determining whether or not to include a record in the results list.  If you select AND for Compare Type, SmartFill will display all records that contain “blue” and “widget”.  For instance, if a record contains “widget container, blue”, then this would be considered a match if Search With Each Token is marked.  If it is not marked, then this would not be considered a match.

If you choose OR for Compare Type, SmartFill will search for matches of either “blue” or “widget”.  For example, “blue carton” and “green widget” would both be matches.

Learn more about SmartFill by Rockton Software by watching a YouTube Demo!

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