T250: InquiryForms

Version: 2025R1
Category: Technical

How to Use This Course

The T250 Inquiry Forms training course shows how to create inquiry forms by using Acumatica Framework and the customization tools of Acumatica ERP. On an inquiry form, users can view data narrowed by the selection criteria they have specified; these forms are similar to reports but designed for online viewing. While reports are generated in a printable format and have been designed to meaningfully arrange the data, inquiry forms display the data in a table and give the user greater flexibility to dynamically alter selection criteria and configure the table as needed to change the data being viewed. This course is intended for application developers who are starting to learn how to customize Acumatica ERP. The course is based on a set of examples that demonstrate the general approach to customizing Acumatica ERP. The course is designed to give you ideas about how to develop your own embedded applications through the customization tools. As you go through the course, you will continue the development of the customization for the cell phone repair shop, which was performed in the previous training courses of the T series (which we recommend that you take before completing the current course). Aer you complete all the lessons of the course, you will be familiar with the programming techniques that are used to define the Acumatica ERP inquiry forms.

          We recommend that you complete the examples in the order in which they are provided in the course,
          because some examples use the results of previous ones.

What the Course Prerequisites Are

To complete this course, you should be familiar with the basic concepts of Acumatica Framework and Acumatica Customization Platform. Before you begin this course, we recommend that you complete the following training courses:

T200 Maintenance Forms
T210 Customized Forms and Master-Detail Relationship
T220 Data Entry and Setup Forms
T230 Actions
T240 Processing Forms To complete the course successfully, you should have the following required knowledge:
Proficiency with C#, including but not limited to the following features of the language:
Class structure
OOP (inheritance, interfaces, and polymorphism)
Usage and creation of attributes
Generics
Delegates, anonymous methods, and lambda expressions
Knowledge of the following main concepts of ASP.NET and web development:
Application states
The debugging of ASP.NET applications by using Visual Studio
The process of attaching to IIS by using Visual Studio debugging tools
Client- and server-side development
The structure of web forms
Experience with SQL Server, including doing the following:
Writing and debugging complex SQL queries (WHERE clauses, aggregates, and subqueries) How to Use This Course | 6
Understanding the database structure (primary keys, data types, and denormalization)
The following experience with IIS:
The configuration and deployment of ASP.NET websites
The configuration and securing of IIS

What Is in a Part

The first part of the course explains how to create an inquiry form with diﬀerent kinds of filtering.
The second part of the course explains how to display information from diﬀerent DACs on a single tab by using the
PXProjection attribute.
Each part of the course consists of lessons you should complete.

What Is in a Lesson

Each lesson is dedicated to a particular development scenario that you can implement by using Acumatica ERP
customization tools and Acumatica Framework. Each lesson consists of a brief description of the scenario and an
example of the implementation of this scenario.
The lesson may also include Additional Information topics, which are outside of the scope of this course but may be
useful to some readers.
Each lesson ends with a Lesson Summary topic, which summarizes the development techniques used during the
implementation of the scenario.

Where the Source Code Is

You can find the source code of the customization described in this course and code snippets for the course in the
Customization\T250 folder of the Help-and-Training-Examples repository in Acumatica GitHub.

What the Documentation Resources Are

The complete Acumatica ERP and Acumatica Framework documentation is available at https://help.acumatica.com/
and is included in the Acumatica ERP instance. While viewing any form used in the course, you can click the Open
Help button in the top pane of the Acumatica ERP screen to bring up a form-specific Help menu; you can use the
links on this menu to quickly access form-related information and activities and to open a reference topic with
detailed descriptions of the form elements.

Which License You Should Use

For the educational purposes of this course, you use Acumatica ERP under the trial license, which does not require
activation and provides all available features. For the production use of the Acumatica ERP functionality, an
administrator has to activate the license the organization has purchased. Each particular feature may be subject to
additional licensing; please consult the Acumatica ERP licensing policy for details.

Company Story and Customization Description | 7

Company Story and Customization Description

In this course, you will continue the development to support the cell phone repair shop of the Smart Fix company; you began and expanded on this development while completing the previous training courses of the T series.

          You have loaded and published the customization project with the results of these courses in Initial
          Configuration.

In the previous training courses of the T series, you have created the following custom forms:

The Repair Services (RS201000) maintenance form, which the Smart Fix company uses to manage the lists of repair services that the company provides
The Serviced Devices (RS202000) maintenance form, which the Smart Fix company uses to manage the lists of devices that can be serviced
The Services and Prices (RS203000) maintenance form, which provides users with the ability to define and maintain the price for each provided repair service
The Repair Work Orders (RS301000) data entry form, which is used to create and manage individual work orders for repairs
The Repair Work Order Preferences (RS101000) setup form, which an administrative user uses to specify the company's preferences for the repair work orders You have also customized the Stock Items (IN202500) form of Acumatica ERP so that users can mark particular stock items as repair items—that is, items that are used for the repair services. In this course, you will create the Open Payment Summary (RS401000) custom inquiry form. On this form, users will view all repair work orders and sales orders that have not yet been paid in full, along with information about the invoices that have been created for these orders. You will implement the functionality of the form in stages. First, you will implement this form as an inquiry form without filters. Then you will add filtering by using a data view and a data view delegate. You will also learn how to aggregate data in a data view. Finally, you will add redirection links in diﬀerent columns of the inquiry form. You will implement a new tab on the Repair Work Orders form that will be shown only if the selected order has been paid in full; this tab will display information about the invoice and the last payment for the repair work order.

Open Payment Summary Form

The following screenshot shows how the Open Payment Summary (RS401000) form will look once you have completed the course. Company Story and Customization Description | 8

Figure: Open Payment Summary form

The form will contain the following parts:

The filtering elements in the Selection area, which can be used to filter the list of repair work orders by the customer and service type and to filter the list of sales orders by the customer. Also, the Selection area will contain a check box that indicates whether subtotals for all orders with the same status should be displayed in the Balance column along with individual balances.
The table, which displays the list of repair work orders and sales orders that have not yet been paid in full.

Payment Info Tab

The following screenshot shows how the Payment Info tab will look at the end of the course. Company Story and Customization Description | 9

Figure: Payment Info tab

The tab will contain the following elements:

The Invoice Nbr. box, which holds the number of the invoice created for the order
The Due Date box, which contains the due date of the invoice
The Latest Payment box, containing the number of the payment that was the most recent payment applied to the invoice
The Latest Amount Paid box, which contains the amount of the most recently applied payment Initial Configuration | 10

Initial Configuration

You need to perform the prerequisite actions before you start to complete the course.

Test Instance for Customization: General Information

In this chapter, you will learn how to deploy an Acumatica ERP test instance that contains custom and customized forms. You can use this instance to complete the training course. Custom forms are forms that are created entirely from scratch by a customizer. Customized forms are forms that are based on predefined forms in Acumatica ERP, but are modified by a customizer to fit a specific business process.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to do the following:

Prepare the environment
Deploy an Acumatica ERP test instance

Applicable Scenarios

You deploy an Acumatica ERP test instance by using the instructions in this chapter if you need to complete the training course.

Deploying a Test Instance

You can use the Acumatica ERP Configuration wizard to deploy instances based on predefined datasets. It also makes it possible to deploy test instances that contain custom and customized forms. In the Acumatica ERP Configuration wizard, you click Deploy a New Acumatica ERP Instance for T-Series Developer Courses and select the applicable training course in the list. The instance that you are preparing contains the data that is required to complete a training course. The instance can also include the published customization project.

To Deploy an Instance for the Training Course

The following activity will walk you through the process of preparing and deploying an Acumatica ERP instance that you can use to perform the steps in the lessons of this training course.

Story

Suppose that you need to perform customization tasks and complete the activities described in the lessons of this training course. You need to deploy an instance of Acumatica ERP with the PhoneRepairShop customization project published and then configure the instance.

Process Overview

In this activity, you will prepare the environment and install tools that will help you to perform customization tasks. You will then deploy the instance of Acumatica ERP with the PhoneRepairShop customization project published and Initial Configuration | 11

the dataset from the T270 Workflow API course. Finally, in Acumatica ERP, you will configure the instance that you have deployed.

Step 1: Preparing the Environment

         If you have completed any training course of the T series and are using the same environment for the
         current course, you can skip this step.

To prepare the environment, do the following:

Make sure that the environment that you are going to use conforms to the System Requirements for the Acumatica ERP Installation.
Make sure that the Web Server (IIS) features that are listed in Configuration of IIS Web Server Features are turned on.
Install the Acuminator extension for Visual Studio.
Clone or download the customization project and the source code of the extension library from the Help- and-Training-Examples repository in Acumatica GitHub to a folder on your computer.

Install Acumatica ERP. On the Main Soware Configuration page of the Acumatica ERP Setup wizard, select the Install Acumatica ERP and Install Debugger Tools check boxes.

              If you have already installed Acumatica ERP without debugger tools, you should remove
              Acumatica ERP and install it again with the Install Debugger Tools check box selected. The
              reinstallation of Acumatica ERP does not aﬀect existing Acumatica ERP instances. You can
              also install the Acumatica ERP Tools separately. For details, see Acumatica ERP Installation On-
              Premises: To Install the Acumatica ERP Tools (Optional).

Step 2: Deploying the Instance To perform customization tasks, you need to deploy an instance of Acumatica ERP for the T250 Inquiry Forms training course on the instance. You deploy an Acumatica ERP instance and configure it as follows:

Open the Acumatica ERP Configuration wizard, and do the following: a. Click Deploy a New Acumatica ERP Instance for T-Series Developer Courses. b. On the Instance Configuration page, do the following: a. In the Training Course box, select T250 Inquiry Forms. b. In the Local Path to the Instance box, select a folder that is outside of the C:\Program Files (x86), C:\Program Files, and C:\Users folders. (We recommend that you store the website folder outside of these folders to avoid an issue with permission to work in these folders when you customize the website.) c. On the Database Configuration page, make sure the name of the database is SmartFix_T250. The system creates a new Acumatica ERP instance, adds a new tenant, loads the data to it, and publishes the customization project that is needed for activities of this training course.
Make sure that a Visual Studio solution is available in the App_Data\Projects\PhoneRepairShop folder of the Acumatica ERP instance folder.
```
   This is the solution of the extension library that you will modify in the activities of this training course.
```
Sign in to the new tenant by using the following credentials:

Username: admin Initial Configuration | 12
Password: setup Change the password when the system prompts you to do so.

In the top right corner of the Acumatica ERP screen, click the username, and then click My Profile. The User Profile (SM203010) form opens. On the General Info tab, select YOGIFON in the Default Branch box; then click Save on the form toolbar. In subsequent sign-ins to this account, you will be signed in to this branch.
Optional: Add the Customization Projects (SM204505) and Generic Inquiry (SM208000) forms to your favorites. For details about how to add a form to your favorites, see Favorites: General Information. Part 1: The Open Payment Summary Form | 13

Lesson 2.1: Add the Payment Info Tab

InquiryForms