Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Typing in a LOOKUP Field

This is probably my favorite end user addition that has come through to Titan. You can type inside of a lookup field. I can't tell you how many users have requested that whenever I go through training. Microsoft did a great job of dialing this in too. First just put your cursor into the field and you'll see the flashing cursor waiting for you to type in it.


Here I type in "David Fronk" and notice that it is not "hotlinked" yet until I click out of the field.


As soon as I click away, or tab out of the field CRM checks the Contact database to see if what I typed matches any existing contact record. If it finds one, and only one, record then you get the nice blue "hotlinked" name with the contact record.


If however you type in someone that does not exist in the linked database, or if there are duplicates, the system will not know which record to link to and you will get a red X and red hotlink telling you that this is incorrect.



You will then have to check your spelling or pick one of the multiple records that exist in the database so that CRM knows which record to link to.
This works on all lookup fields you come across. Including Product, Unit of Measure, Primary Contact, Parent Customer, etc.

Very nice and easy functionality that will reduce clicks and help people choose which way to fill out the form and hopefully fill out the form faster. Oh, and in case you're wondering about the speed of that check on the field, it's actually really fast. I haven't tested it on a system that has over a million contact records but for the small amount of data I have in the system it flew.

David Fronk
Dynamic Methods Inc.

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