Weekly Dynamic: Extender and Report Writer

A client was recently using KB 935385 and KB 898983  to attached an Extender field to Report Writer. The KB’s are fine but the examples are unclear in a few places so I thought I would provide some screenshots for clarity.

In this case the user was  trying to add a short note field from the customer address to a SOP order. The key in this case was Customer Number and Address Code ID, so those items needed to be concatenated into a single key to link back to the Extender field.

The basic steps are:

1. Create and test the Extender field.
2. Create a calculated to combine the Extender key fields into a key.
3. Create a second calculated field to pass the key and return the extender data.
4. Add the second calculated field to the SOP order.

This is what steps 2 and 3 look like so you can see an example:

Calculated Field 1: Build the Key

Left Side

Right Side

Calculated Field 2: Use the Key to return data.

Keep in mind that if you put the calculated field in a hidden area of a SOP document, this field will be hidden too. So if you put this in the comments area but there aren’t any comments, this won’t show. If there is a comment, it will show.