Method Community

I am trying to add a dropdown when building sales order so that the sales reps can choose from a list of Contacts from the company. I have looked around at the forums and thought I knew how to properly do this but it is not working out as planned. I went to the SalesOrder table and added a dropdown field called ContactRecordID and then picked the Contacts table and the RecordID as the field. I then added a linked Field called CustomerContactName and linked it using ContactRecordID with the linked field FullName. I then finished editing and placed the dropdown on the SalesOrder screen. When I try it out it just gives me a big list of companies and not contacts.

Please advise on the proper method to accomplish this.

Thank you,

Conner

Hi Conner,

You’re almost there, but you need to change a couple of things. First, you need to link the Name field instead. The FullName field contains the customer’s full name, not the contact’s name. Once you have done this, you will be able to format your ContactRecordID dropdown to display the name of the contact.

Next, you will need to setup a filter on this dropdown. We will use the FullName field for this. The filter compares the FullName of the contact, with the customer selected from the Customer dropdown. Now it will only display contacts for the selected customer.

Give this a shot and post back if you have any more questions. I hope this helps.

-Audisho

That worked, thank you so much! I was stuck on that for a while.

Conner

I have one more question. I noticed that the fields like PO Number, Terms,Due Date, etc in the sales order screen use a label object in one cell and the actual data field below it. While in the estimates screen they just include a caption (location: top) within the data field. Is there a difference between these two methods? In the case of those fields (PO Number, Terms, Due Date) wouldn't it make more sense to do a caption location:top in order to free up the cells used by label objects? I just want to make sure that by deleting the label objects and moving to captions on top I will not be messing anything up.

Thank you,

Conner

Hi Conner,

Using a label vs. caption was merely a design decision. There’s about a year difference between the times that each of these screens was last updated. My guess would be that a different person here at Method worked on each, hence the difference.

Removing the labels shouldn’t cause you any problems, but changing the captions might since the caption is essentially the name of the object. If you plan on doing this, just be sure to make a copy of the screen first as a backup. That way if anything goes wrong, you can revert back. I hope this helps.

-Audisho