Picklist Column types – Dispaying ticket status in the SalesLogix LAN datagrid

I recently had to build a datagrid displaying ticket information, including the current Status value.  Under tickets, the Statuscode field contains the itemid from the picklist table rather than the actual text value as is stored for the Account, Contact or Opportunity areas.  If you’ve only dealt with picklists in those other areas, it could cause some confusion when trying to determine just how to display the Ticket status text value in a datagird, however using the picklist column type makes this very easy.

When initially building the grid, you’ll want to add the Ticket.Statuscode column within the Layout tab of the query builder for the grid, just as you would any other field.  Once that is done, open the Columns collection properties for the grid.

 If you right-click the Status column, one of the options will be “Change Column Type…”.  Select this and chance the type from “Standard” to “Picklist”.  Once this is done, right-click the status column again, but this type select “Properties…”.

As you can see, this interface contains a number of properties.  In the case of displaying ticket status values, there are two that you have to worry about.  First, set the “Picklist” property to contain the appropriate picklist (in this case, Ticket Status).  In addition, you’ll need to check the “Store Items IDs” checkbox.

That’s all there is to it.  Your grid will now translate the itemid value do display the actual text value stored in the picklist table.

In my next blog post, I’ll go over what this means in the Web client.

Thanks for reading!  

 Jason