Perhaps this has already been posted on 90Minds, but I couldn't find a reference to it in my searches; someone in our office just brought the Sage KB article below regarding extended descriptions in Version 2016 to my attention:
**Here is the KB article notes**
1.Open the Sales Order Printing window.
2.Click the Designer button to launch Crystal Designer.
3.Click the Field Explorer button, and add the field ExtendedDescriptionText:Memo field to the form.
4.Suppress the item code description:
1.Right-click the ItemCodeDesc field, and select Format Field
2.Click the Common tab.
3.Click the x-2 formula button across from Suppress
4.Enter the following calculation for version 2016 and higher:
?{SO_SalesOrderWrk.ExtendedDescriptionKey}<> MAKEARRAY("""",""0000000000"")
5.Enter the following calculation for versions prior to 2015:
?{SO_SalesOrderWrk.ExtendedDescriptionKey}<>""""
6.Click Save and Close
7.Click OK to close Format Editor
8.Save the changes and test the report.
after reading this, I wanted to explore the ""why"" of it all. I think that this is going to be very important to any client that we upgrade if they use extended Descriptions.
In the past we checked the field ""ExtendedDescriptonKey"" or ""ExtendedDescriptionText"" to conditionally suppress the ""short"" item code description. Or we sometimes used a formula, that uses the regular description if the extended description is blank or null.
Starting with Version 2016 Sage is populating the field ""ExtendedDescriptionKey"" with zeros (0000000000) when there is no extended description for that item. (I think that happens during data conversion too) Previously Sage just left that field NULL. I suspect they had some reason for doing this; most likely some other issue when that field is null.
Since that field now has a value, if there is any text stored in the 0000000000 record of table CI_ExtendedDescription.m4t then that text field has a value and would print if you are checking to see if that value is Null or if the text is null.