Dynamics GP Document attachments “i” and “d” check box columns

A question came up on the GP forums  today regarding the "i" and "d" column check boxes in the Dynamics GP document attachment management window and specifically what they are there for.

Luckily I got to have a good play with this window when it was first released as a new feature in GP, so I had some idea about the answer.

Above shows the meaning of the d and i in the column headings, you can hover over them to get this as a tool tip, but what are the check boxes used for that are under these headings?

Here in the screenshot (click to enlarge), you can see that for attachments to records on the Item Maintenance window (Item Card) only, the check boxes can be checked against the attachments. Although these check boxes show under other document types, they are disabled and can only be checked on attachments to Item Maintenance. There are also some other constraints. The image check box may only be checked if the attachment row has a file attached of type .bmp and the description check box may only be checked if the row has a file attached of type .txt, (text file and bitmap image file respectively).

Also note that only one image per attachment window (document) can be selected and only one description may be selected at any one time.

What is it for?

This feature allows a default image and long full catalogue listing style description to be associated to an item. This could be useful for many potential applications. You can image in some industries, printing a photo of the image on the pick list would aid warehouse pickers identify an item accurately.

You could also image if GP were connected to an ecommerce website this mechanism would provide a basic content management system (CMS), where the item image and the item description contained in the selected attachments could be used by the website (via the website integration), to show against that item on the website pages.

I am certain you could imagine other uses too.

If you found this helpful then please do comment, it motivates me to keep blogging!