Table buffers

A table buffer provides access to one row of a specific table. The information in the table buffer comes from either the table or a script that has run. Your code will interact with the table buffer when you perform operations on the table. There are two types of table buffers: global and form-level.

A global table buffer is created when a table is accessed directly through the global list of tables. Global table buffers are accessed through the dictionary class. This class has a Tables property that provides access to the collection of tables defined in the dictionary. A global table buffer is not associated with any specific form. This makes global table buffers useful in situations where a Visual Studio Tools integration must read from or write to a Dynamics GP table, but isn't interacting with the user interface.

By default, a global table buffer for a table is shared with all of the other Visual Studio Tools add-ins that are accessing that same table. If you want your integration to create a global table buffer that is not shared, use the Clone() method when creating the instance of the global table buffer.

A form-level table buffer is created when a table is attached to a form in Microsoft Dynamics GP. There is one table buffer for each table that is attached to the form. Each form-level table buffer is shared by the code that is part of the form, as well as any code outside of the form that accesses the table through that form. The Tables property for the form allows access to the table buffers for the tables that are attached to the form. Because they are shared, form-level table buffers aren't typically used by Visual Studio Tools integrations to directly read from or write to tables. Instead, the form-level table buffers are examined to find what data the Dynamics GP window has read or is writing to the specific table.