Foreign key replacement

In Ax 2012, the application can automatically replace RecId-based foreign keys (surrogate keys) with one or more fields showing values which are meaningful to the users.

Introduction

When using a table's surrogate key as the foreign key in a related table, the foreign key replacement mechanism is used to improve the user-interface experience for users.

Prior to the introduction of this feature, adding a control bound to a RecId-based foreign key field would result in a simple Int64 control being used on the form. While this would correctly display and allow editing of the value, RecIds are system-generated, not meaningful to users and therefore of little or no value.

Since Ax 2012, an automatic replacement mechanism can display one or more fields from the related table on a form in place of the meaningless RecId field. This is often a single replacement field which uniquely identifies the record using a meaningful value, but it can be a combination of multiple fields which together guarantee uniqueness.