Dot-Walking

• Allows direct access to fields for related records (reference objects) by traversing tables
• Syntax: <object>.<reference object name>.<field of interest>
• Example: current.caller_id.department.name

Clien-side you must use the getReference() method to access data from related record. Recall this method requires a call to the server from the client and it only allows one-level of dot-walking on the retrieved object. Business Rules run on the server and have direct access to the database. To hop from table to table you use a strategy called "dot-walking".

Dot-walking is for one-to-one relationships and not for one-to-many (e.g. - related lists).

In this example, the current object is an Incident [incident] table record. The statement current.caller_id.department.name jumps from the Incident [incident] table record to the related record in the User [sys_user] table where the sys_id matches the caller_id from the Incident table. The department id is then used to jump to the matching record on the Department [cmn_department] table. The caller's department name it then retrieved.