Using the new FilterPage in NAV 2016

I was a little surprised to not find any information online on the new FilterPage type in Dynamics NAV 2016.

As a part of the new Workflow feature Microsoft built a new generic feature to ask the user for a filter on any record.

Workflow

Pressing the Assist-Edit button will open the Dynamic Filter Page.

DynamicFilterPage

This view is the same view a NAV users is familiar with when starting reports and batches.

Now to show how to use this new feature.  The best way to show is usually with an example.

Go to the Chart of Accounts.  Then from the ribbon select G/L Balance by Dimension.  Select a setup similar to the screenshot below and press Show Matrix on the ribbon.

GLByDimension

Now you are in a page where you can’t filter anything.  You will see all G/L Accounts within the G/L Account Filter selected earlier and all Accounting Periods in columns according to the Matix Options.  Yes, you have all the normal filter options on the page but none of them work.

OriginalMatrix

So lets see how to use the Dynamic FilterPage to give the user a better experience of this feature.

The first challenge; I want a single month comparison in the columns.  Lets compare amounts for January by year.

To do this we need to make a few modifications to Page 408.

Add the global text variable PeriodTableView.

Page408AddNewGlobal

When the user changes what to show as columns we need to make sure that the PeriodTableView is empty.

Page408ClearPeriodTableView

When the column captions are generated the new PeriodTableView should be used.

Page408AddSetView

Same changes needs to be applied to the NextRec function.

Two new functions needs to be added to ask the user for the filter.

Page408NewFunctions

And finally, get these functions available for the user.

CallingPageView

The result is that the user can now press the Assist-Edit button and enter a filter for every column option.

Page408AccountingPeriod

To attain our goal, lets filter on the month we want to see.

FilterOnJanuary

And the result Matrix looks like this.

MatrixForJanuary

We could add a filter page to the Matrix Page to be able to filter on the G/L Accounts using the same methods and we could add a functionality to add filter on the lines similar to what we did for the columns, but I am not going though that now.

The modified Page 408 is attached.  Good luck.

Page408