This article is intended to help large or complex implementations choose where to store quality specifications for Quality Inspector.

Quality Inspector provides several ways to store specifications such as target values, acceptable ranges, dimensional tolerances, and pass criteria. The best approach depends mainly on how widely the specification is reused and what causes it to vary.

A specification can be stored directly on a Quality Inspection Field, customized on an individual Quality Inspection Template line, derived from Item or Item Attribute data, or retrieved dynamically from another Business Central table. Quality Inspector also supports expressions that combine these approaches.

Choosing an approach

These methods are not mutually exclusive. A template can combine fixed field specifications, template-specific conditions, Item values, and dynamically calculated specifications.

Store the specification on a Quality Inspection Field

A Quality Inspection Field defines a reusable data point, question, or measurement. Fields can include allowable values and default passing thresholds and can then be reused across Quality Inspection Templates.

This approach works well when the meaning and specification of a measurement are consistent wherever it is used.

For example, you might create a field called:

ROOMTEMP – Room Temperature

with a default passing condition of:

18..24

When the field is added to a template, its grade conditions provide the initial conditions for that template.

Use this approach when:

• The same specification is used repeatedly.
• You want a centrally defined default.
• Separate field codes make the inspection plan easier for users to understand or maintain.

See Quality Inspection Fields and Configure Grades.

Store the specification on the Quality Inspection Template

Specifications can also be configured for the individual measurement on a Quality Inspection Template.

This is useful when the type of measurement is reusable but its pass criteria vary depending on the inspection.

For example, a dimensional inspection might contain several decimal measurements:

• Balloon 10: 0.123..0.127
• Balloon 11: 0.123..0.135
• Balloon 12: 0.124..0.126

The template can therefore define the requirement that applies to each particular characteristic rather than requiring every specification to be represented solely by a globally configured field.

This approach is especially useful for engineering drawings and First Article Inspection processes. For these inspections, use Template Type = Balloon / Bubble, which enables Balloon No./Characteristic No. and Characteristic Designator information on the template.

See:

• Create and Use a Balloon/Bubble Template in Quality Inspector
• Designing Large Dimensional Inspection Plans in Quality Inspector
• Configuring Nominal Dimensions and Symmetric/Asymmetric Tolerances

Store the specification on the Item Card

If a specification is fundamentally an item property, storing it on the Item Card can avoid duplicating the same value in Quality Inspector.

Quality Inspector can reference an Item field using:

[Item:FieldName]

For example:

[Item:Gross Weight]

evaluates using the Gross Weight of the item associated with the Quality Inspection Test.

This works well when:

• There is one current value per item.
• The value already belongs logically on the Item Card.
• Other Business Central processes may also need the value.

See Reference a Field from an Item Card or an Item Attribute in Allowable Conditions or Pass Conditions.

Store the specification as an Item Attribute

Quality Inspector can also reference standard Business Central Item Attributes using:

[Attribute:AttributeName]

For example:

[Attribute:Width]

can retrieve the Width attribute for the item associated with the inspection.

Item Attributes are useful when:

• The specification is naturally an item characteristic.
• The attribute is already being maintained for other purposes.
• You want to avoid adding custom fields to the Item table.

They are less suitable when an item needs many independently versioned specifications or when multiple characteristics of the same type exist on a single drawing.

See Reference a Field from an Item Card or an Item Attribute in Allowable Conditions or Pass Conditions.

Store customer specific specifications

Quality Inspector provides an ability to have customer specific tolerances that can be used to evaluate whether a lot/serial/package with an existing laboratory test that passes is suitable for a customer that has more specific or different tolerances or other lot qualification criteria than what exists for an existing test.

• Automatically Create Customer CoA PDFs in Quality Inspector
• Create Customer-Specific Certificates of Analysis in Quality Inspector
• Configure Customer Qualification Warnings, Blocks, and Overrides
• How to Find Lots That Meet a Customer’s Quality Specifications in Quality Inspector
• Configure Customer Quality Specifications in Quality Inspector

Store specifications in a separate specification table

For more complex requirements, specifications can be maintained in another Business Central table and retrieved using Quality Inspector’s Lookup(...) expressions.

This is useful when:

• An item can move between specification revisions.
• A specification contains many values.
• Multiple items share the same specification.
• Lower and upper tolerances must be calculated from stored target values.
• Specifications need their own data structure rather than being added individually to the Item Card.

For example, an Item might reference specification version REV03, while the specification table stores its nominal dimensions and tolerances. A Quality Inspector expression can retrieve the appropriate value when the test is created.

The existing Look up Specifications from Another Table when Creating Quality Inspection Tests article demonstrates this pattern, including symmetric and asymmetric tolerances and expressions combining [Item:...], Lookup(...), and calculations.

General guidance

A useful starting point is to store the specification as close as practical to the data that owns it:

• If it belongs to the measurement itself, consider the Quality Inspection Field.
• If it belongs to a particular inspection or drawing characteristic, consider the template line.
• If it belongs to the item, consider an Item field or Item Attribute.
• If it belongs to a revision, specification, formula, or other separately managed dataset, consider a specification table with Lookup(...) expressions.

For larger implementations, a combination is often appropriate. For example, reusable Quality Inspection Fields may define the measurements being collected, Balloon / Bubble template lines identify the individual drawing characteristics, and a specification table provides revision-controlled nominal values and tolerances.