Friday, March 25, 2011

Reordering fields and controls by Drag-N-Drop

I'm trying to do the most basic of tasks, I'm trying to reorder controls on a form.  I click on it and drag it to where I want it to go, it doesn't move anywhere.  At first I thought there might be some sort of a locking property that won't let me change the order of the controls.  Looking through the properties of the form, I don't see anything of the sort.  I remember that I could reorder fields in a table by Drag-N-Drop with much ease, as expected.  Months earlier, I found myself in the same situation, unable to reorder fields in a index.  The way I actually did it back then was change the Data Field properties of each of the fields.  This was horribly time consuming especially when I needed to add a field to the end of an index.  Right-click adding a New Field just added a blank field to the beginning, I had to go through each one and change it, moving each one up one spot and adding the new field to the end.

Since this time, I have been told how to reorder objects consistently in DAX.  Click on the field you want to move, hit:

Alt+(Up/Down) to move an object up or down

It's that plain and simple, but I could not believe how non-intuitive that is.  Like us developers are just supposed to know this.  Drag-N-Drop works perfect in reordering fields in tables, why doesn't it work in reordering fields in table indexes?

It's this non-consistent behavior within DAX that just blows my mind and makes it a nightmare to get things done in.  Granted I'm working in 4.0, but all I can do hope AX 2009/2012 fixes these issues.

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