Acting on Several Records at Once

A list screen does more than show you records. Tick a few rows and the More menu offers a set of actions that run over the whole selection in one go — deleting them, committing the drafts among them, retiring them from use, or sending them out to a spreadsheet.

These actions are built in. Every list screen has them, on every entity, with no setup at all.

Choosing the records

Every row carries a tick box at its left edge, and the column header carries one that ticks the whole page in a single click.

"Select all" means the page you are looking at, not the whole search

The tick box in the column header selects the rows currently displayed — not every record that matched your filter. With the default page size of 25, a search that found 900 records and one click on the header tick box gives you 25 selected records, not 900.

If you need to act on more than a page's worth, raise the page size first — the control at the foot of the list offers 25, 50, 75, 100 and All — and then select. What you can see is what you get.

Start an action with nothing ticked and it stops straight away with Please Select Rows.

Deleting the selected records

Delete Selected Records removes every ticked record, one after another. Before it runs it asks two questions:

Question	What it decides
Are you sure that you want to delete the selected records?	Whether the deletion happens at all
Stop With First Error	What happens to the rest when one record refuses

Both boxes start unticked.

The confirmation box is the confirmation — it must be ticked

The first box is not a warning to read past; it is the switch that lets the deletion proceed. Leave it unticked, press OK, and the action ends immediately: nothing is deleted, and nothing is reported. To a user it looks as though the menu item did not work.

Leave "Stop With First Error" unticked unless you have a reason not to

Unticked — the default — the run carries on past any record it cannot delete and finishes by listing the codes of all the records that failed, each with its reason. Tick it and the run stops at the first refusal, leaving everything after it untouched.

Unticked is usually what you want. One run then tells you about every problem at once, instead of making you rediscover them one record at a time.

Records refuse to be deleted for the ordinary reasons: something else in the system still refers to them, they have been revised, or the user does not hold the delete authority for that entity. The deletion itself is the same one that the delete button performs on a single record — nothing is skipped or forced because it happens in bulk.

Committing the drafts in a selection

Save selected records if draft commits. Despite the wording it does not save anything as a draft — it looks at each selected record, commits the ones that are still drafts, and passes over the ones that were already committed without saying anything about them.

It is the quick way to finish off a batch of documents that were entered and left as drafts, without opening each one. Each record goes through the ordinary commit, so a draft that fails its validations fails here exactly as it would have on its own screen.

Retiring records from use

Prevent Usage and Allow Usage appear on the same menu and act on the whole selection at once. Run from a list screen the change is saved immediately — unlike the same pair on a record's own screen, which only marks the form as changed and waits for you to save.

What being retired actually does, which settings control who can still see and use such records, and how to tell one at a glance, are all covered in Preventing a Record From Being Used.

Both actions stop at the first record they cannot process, and the records after it are left alone.

Sending records to a spreadsheet

Three export items sit next to each other on the menu and differ only in what they cover:

Menu item	What it exports
Export Selected	The ticked rows
Export Page	Every row on the page in front of you
Export All Records	Every record of that type

Each opens the same options box — which fields to include, whether to add the identifier columns, whether detail lines go to their own sheet. These options, and the matching import that reads the file back in, are covered in Importing and Exporting Records.

Import Records on the same menu is the other half of that round trip.

Adding records to a favourite

Add To Current User Favourites puts the screen itself on your Favourites menu. Add Selected Records To Lines of Current User Favourite is the different and more useful one: it pins the specific records you ticked, so a handful of documents you keep coming back to are one click away.

Watching a run, and stopping it

These actions do not hold up the browser. Each one starts and hands you back the screen while it works through the selection in the background, reporting progress as it goes. A run that is taking too long, or was started by mistake, can be ended from the same place with Kill Task — records already processed stay processed; the rest are left alone.

When a run finishes with failures, the report names the records that failed by code and gives the reason for each, so the list can be worked through afterwards.

What ends up in the history

Every one of these actions goes through the same service the screens themselves use, so each affected record gets its ordinary history entry: a new version, and an audit trail line showing what changed. A user browsing a record's history afterwards sees a normal edit.

Nothing marks a change as having come from a mass action, and the actions are not grouped together in any way. If it matters that a batch of records was changed together on a particular afternoon, the time stamps are the only thing tying them to each other — worth knowing before running one of these over a large selection.

See also

• Preventing a Record From Being Used — what Prevent Usage does
• Bulk Edit — changing the same fields on a whole selection
• Importing and Exporting Records — the export options in full
• Quick Filters in List Views — narrowing the list down before you select