InforCRM has had the ability to define boolean entity properties as either True/False or Yes/No for a long time, however in a recent project, I found that displaying such an entity property as a bound field in a Data Grid would always display True or False (or nothing, if not set) regardless if it was set as a Yes/No data type.
In this project, the client wanted to display either Yes or No in the datagrid. I also wanted to account for unset values, showing “No” if the underlying property was null. To accomplish this, I turned to a Custom Format column in the datagrid.
Ryan previously posted a great article describing how to use of custom format columns to link to external sites, and I did something similar to display my desired values.
In the datagrid properties, I added a new Custom Format column, set the datafield to my boolean entity property and gave the method I was going to create a name of booleanDisplay in the Format Method Name property. For the actual method, I included the following:
protected string booleanDisplay(object boolValue)
{
bool val;
if (boolValue != null)
{
val = (bool)boolValue;
}
else
{
val = false;
}
if (val)
{
return "Yes";
}
else
{
return "No";
}
}
A couple notes on that code: The method defined will always need an Object defined as the method parameter. This required me to then check to see if the property had passed a null to the method. If not, I cast the value to a new boolean variable. If it is null, I set the boolean variable to false. Once I had my boolean variable, I simply had to evaluate it and return a “Yes” if true, or “No” if false.
All in all, this was a very simple way to evaluate a boolean entity property, and return Yes or No (or any value, really) based on the result, while also accounting for a potentially null value in the entity property.
