Spare Brained Ideas - Demo BigText

Demonstrating use of the BLOB Memo content on Pages and Reports in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Table

The Table getting the BLOB field also gets helper Getter/Setter type functions

Page

The Page displaying the BLOB gets a Variable to store the Text data. We load the Text Var OnAfterGetRecord from the getter. We also push the data back in the OnValidate of the field.

Option - Big Field

When you include this on a page, the default I used in the demo code is a multiline field within the standard layout, which doesn't show much information to the user.

If you use this field in a group by itself with the Caption disabled, it will visually occupy a lot more height and width.

layout
    {
        addafter(Item)
        {
            group(BigText)
            {
                Caption = 'Some Really Big Text Section';
                field(ActuallyExtendedText; ActuallyExtendedText)
                {
                    ApplicationArea = All;
                    MultiLine = true;
                    ShowCaption = false;

                    trigger OnValidate()
                    begin
                        Rec.SetActuallyExtendedText(ActuallyExtendedText);
                    end;
                }
            }
        }
    }

Sadly, there's no way to request the control be larger than the default height (at the time of writing this, on 17.4).

Report

If you load a Text Variable from the Getter the same way, you can include the BLOB content in the Report Data.

Caveats

Use this very carefully, as BLOB content can quickly make report datasets balloon to be too large.