Hello,

I am getting up to speed on Purchase Part Characteristics and like what I see. These will be handy when we’d rather not add a custom field. I wish more LUs had “Characteristics”… (Is it just Inventory Parts and Purchase Parts?)

However, I am perplexed by the "Find Purchase Part by Characteristics Assistant". It works -- I can bring up various alpha and numeric search fields and end up with a filtered list of Purchase Parts, but...then what? What is the point of displaying a bunch of records in a grid? If I want to access that Purchase Part in its most useful state (the Purchase Part screen) I would have to write down the part number (or CTRL+C) then navigate to the Purchase Part screen and search for it again. The Assistant does not even offer a way to export the search results to Excel -- that would at least be semi-useful.

Even more silly, the final listing of results lets you edit the records as if you can make persistent changes to the data, but there is no way to save the changes.

Am I missing something? Does this Characteristics search assistant have any useful purpose? As it stands I will have to create Lobbies to do what I thought the Assistant would do for me, which means more development time and more ongoing maintenance (because I’ll likely need to create IALs for data sources in this scenario).

Thanks,

Joe Kaufman