AL Object ID Ninja

There are situations when you want to exchange data between different objects in NAV, and there is no simple way to do it. One of those, that a friend stumbled upon a couple of days ago goes like this: you have a page which shows a subpage, that is linked to a factbox. Depending on the situation in the lines, you the factbox shows content from one table or another.

Your instincts may yell “ProviderID” at this moment, but there are some problems with it. ProviderID is used to set the link between different part controls on the same page. But if the link from the provider control results in no record being selected in the target part control, then the OnAfterGetRecord trigger in it does not fire, and you cannot update the content.

Another example may be this: depending on the line selected in the lines part, you may want to show either of two factboxes. Imagine – on a sales order, if you are on a line that sells a resource, you want to show the Resource factbox; and if you are on a line that sells an item, you want to show the Item factbox. You get the gist. There are not many ways you can achieve this.

As a matter of fact, when helping my colleague, I couldn’t think of any.

Except for an old trick which, unfortunately, does not work at all in the RTC. In the good old days of the Classic client, when heroes roamed the Earth, you could pass the CurrForm as a reference onto a function in a subform, which would then store the reference to the main form in its own Form variable. Then, when something happened in the lines, and you wanted to let the master page know, you called the function on the stored reference. It worked like charm. However, in NAV 2013 (and possibly 2009 – can’t bother to check) you cannot assign one page variable to another. Furthermore, the CurrPage variable has page ID in some funny range, and does not even correspond to the actual page number. All in all, no way you can pass, or retain, a reference to a page object, let alone the current page reference.

So, how do you have two, three, or more pages (or page parts, for that matter) talk to each other to pass some information when needed, in all those situations when ProviderID simply doesn’t get the job done (I could bore you to death listing those situations)?

.NET interoperability, what else.