Using Record Info and the importance of field groups on a form

I've often wondered about the Best Practice check in AX that requires all fields to be in a field group and why that is there. I assumed it was some sort of encouragement to use field groups on forms and reports, but today it occurred to me that there is another very valuable tool that uses this information (there are probably many others as well).

If you have the appropriate permissions in Dynamics AX you can right click on any field on a form, select record info, and then select "Show all fields" to open a new form which displays all of the fields in the table and their values regardless of if the field is on the form or not. This is useful for some power users if they are interested in knowing when a record was created or when it was last modified for instance.



Show all Fields

 

I shared this functionality with a user this week, but it wasn't until today that I realized how this form organizes fields into groups based on field groups to help the user find them. So in the future take some time and consideration when creating field groups or adding fields to groups so that users can find these more easily on the Record info screen.