The Generic Inquiry is a great tool in Acumatica. GIs are uses lots of places in the system including as the under pinning of most of the objects you find on a dashboard. We start with a fairly simple dashboard showing open receivables and payables.
A basic Generic Inquiry has built in default navigation for some of the fields. You can see, when we click on the Customer ID, a window pops up with the Customer maintenance screen.
The same thing happens for the Vendor Payables list. Click on the vendor and the Vendor maintenance window pops open.
When you look at the Customer Receivable Generic Inquiry’s definition, you see that nothing special was done to get the Customer maintenance window to appear. In the Results Grid, the Customer ID has the Default Navigation option checked. Checked is the default for all the columns defined on the Results Grid tab. Not all of the columns actually have a built-in navigation process defined out of the box, but some do, and you get that navigation without doing anything special.
This check mark is what causes the Customer window to pop open. If we un-check it, Save the GI, and View it again, you will see that the blue highlighted link is gone. And when we click the Customer ID, nothing happens.
But, what we really want to happen when we click the Customer ID is to get a list ofthe invoices that are summarized into one line in the summary query. This is the Drill Down navigation that we want to learn about.
First, we go back into edit mode on the summary GI. When we look at the Navigation tab, we see that there is a screen defined. It’s not currently doing anything, but we will fix that.
What we see is a link to another GI that lists all the open invoices for all customer.
So, on the Navigation tab, we have defined the screen and told the system how we want to filter the linked screen whenever we click on the Customer ID. What this says is that we have defined a pathto navigate to the details GI screen and pass it the CustomerID as a filter/parameter.
But, there is one more thing we need to do is tell the system. That is what is the link to the detail screen? As we have said, we want to click the customer and get the list of invoices, so in the Results tab, we add the details screen to the Navigate To column and un-check the Default Navigation checkbox. This tells the system we want the CustomerID to be a link and when we click it, don’t go to the default navigation (the customer maintenance screen), but instead, open up a list of open invoices for that customer.
Save the Generic Inquiry, view the Customer Receivables screen, click on aCustomerID, and we see our list of open invoices that total the amount on thesummary list for the customer we clicked on.
Back on our dashboard, we can change the Open Payables list in a very similar manner.
Edit the Open Payables generic inquiry. On the Navigation tab, you can see we have similar detail GI for the payables. Ont he Result Grid, select the detail screen for the VendorID and un-check the default navigation. Save and we are done.
Back on the dashboard, we refresh the screen so that the updated Generic Inquiry is connected. When we click the VendorID on the summary list, we see similar drill down function showing us the list of bills that make up the summary total.
You can see it is pretty simple to change the default navigation from your generic inquires to provide drill down capability you want with Acumatica ERP.
