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Preferably something that will disable this useless, annoying feature globally.

Update 1

By default, Dynamics AX shows only the first 20 rows of a grid. This is an awful feature. I cannot see how much data is in the grid at a glance. I cannot quickly scroll to the data I want because once you get past 19 it only has "Go To Last Record" and then changes to only the last 20 records.

Or: How can I make grids just show all their data?

This feature is working as designed, it's just a crap feature.

Update 2

I've added an image to illustrate what I'm talking about. This lookup is only showing the first 10 rows. As soon as you move the scroll bar to the bottom, all you see is Go to the last record. I have no way of knowing if there are 20 choices or 2000! This behaviour is the same in normal grids as well, although I think they show 20 rows instead. enter image description here

Update 3

I was informed by our companies AX guru that he did manage to disable this caching, although it required changes on the SQL Server end and introduced several stability issues. Since no-one was able to provide an answer, I'll leave this question open.

William Mioch
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  • What do mean by "grid caching"? Describe you problem. Caches are there for a purpose. – Jan B. Kjeldsen May 26 '11 at 06:29
  • Where you only get the first 20 rows displayed in a grid. I find it really annoying. – William Mioch May 26 '11 at 07:12
  • Does the rest show up later? Describe your problem and edit your question. – Jan B. Kjeldsen May 26 '11 at 17:39
  • Are you talking about the Enterprise Portal? If so, say so. I have no "Go To Last Record". – Jan B. Kjeldsen May 27 '11 at 11:46
  • I'll take a screenshot on Monday. I tried to do one today but AX got stuck in an infinite loop and it took me all day to find. – William Mioch May 27 '11 at 12:56
  • Have you tried using your page-down and page-up keys? Do they function? Have you tried clicking on the (unmarked) scoll bar (instead of dragging it all way down)? – Jan B. Kjeldsen May 31 '11 at 06:49
  • Yes, yes - all these things work. Nothing is broken. I just want it to load all records every time. – William Mioch Jun 01 '11 at 04:38
  • Why do you want to load 3 million records (ex. `LedgerTrans`) just to show the scroll bar correctly? – Jan B. Kjeldsen Jun 01 '11 at 10:54
  • Because the system we are shoe-horning into AX (for political reasons) is entirely LAN, does not deal with large numbers of records in any table (10000 would be huge) and having an accurate scroll bar allows for instantaneous visual knowledge of how many records are in the grid. – William Mioch Jun 02 '11 at 05:02
  • I've had a chat with someone I work with - it is possible to do this, but it requires changes on the SQL Server and can cause some problems. Guess I'll just have to live with this broken feature. – William Mioch Jun 25 '11 at 07:03

2 Answers2

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AX (as most systems around) does not fetch all records from the table to the form because it uses a SQL cursor. It will typically limit the number of records fetched in the first round to between 20 and 50. This is usually optimal behaviour as the number of records is not known beforehand.

And no, it cannot be disabled.

Ressources: Top tips ...

Jan B. Kjeldsen
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As stated, this is a 'feature' (even if it is really annoying) that you would not want to turn off, due to the risk of crippling your own machine / SQL server, or in the worst case corrupting the data.

Can I suggest that if you really need to know (and yes sometimes it is vital to know up front) how many rows are in the table you write a method to count the fields and display it on the form or on the grid as necessary.

Zordey
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  • A scrollbar that LIES about how many items it is representing is a broken feature. – William Mioch Jun 25 '11 at 07:02
  • In a way it does represent the number of records received from SQL. If you need to know how many rows in total there are, display a count. If you need to find a record or range of records use the filters. Personally I mostly use the grid filter to find relevant records. – Zordey Jun 25 '11 at 08:51
  • Clearly it's been designed that way. Scrollbars are a fundamental component of the Windows UI and they have a very expected behaviour, which AX breaks. That's the issue. – William Mioch Jun 26 '11 at 00:21
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    I have been trying out AX 2012 today and obviously AX still has the prefetch feature but it seems now that if you move the scrollbar all the way to the top or bottom it will actually scroll and not automatically jump you to the first or last record which is good. – Zordey Jun 29 '11 at 14:46