Often when writing queries in SAP Business One, you’ll encounter user-defined fields (UDFs) that use valid values—essentially dropdowns with predefined options. The typical approach is to write a long CASE statement to translate the stored value into its display label. While this works, it quickly becomes unwieldy and hard to maintain. These CASE blocks clutter your queries, reduce readability, and worse—if the client adds or modifies a valid value, you’re stuck hunting down every instance of that field across reports and scripts to update the logic manually.

To solve this, I developed two reusable functions—one for SAP HANA and one for SQL Server—that dynamically retrieve the display value of a user-defined field based on its stored code. These functions query the system metadata directly, so they always reflect the current valid values configured in the system. No more hardcoded mappings, no more brittle logic.