Types of Sublists

Created: May 26, 2017

To wrap up this week's topic of working with sublists, we'll talk about the different types of sublists within NetSuite.

There are four different types of sublists in NetSuite:

• Editor
• Inline Editor
• List
• Static List

The first two of these, Editor and Inline Editor, are the most common. Both of these sublist types allow users or developers to dynamically add/edit/remove lines, both support SuiteScript, and both require the same API calls to add/modify/remove lines.

The only difference between these two sublist types is their appearance in the UI. With Editor sublists, the fields for adding or modifying a line item are shown above the sublist lines, while for Inline Editor sublists, the fields are inline with the sublist lines.

An example of an Inline Editor sublist would be the Items sublist on a Sales Order. I quite honestly cannot find any examples of an Editor sublist anywhere in the NetSuite UI or Help docs.

List sublists, meanwhile, are not dynamic. The number of line items is fixed and cannot be added or removed, neither through the UI nor through SuiteScript. You can use SuiteScript to read or modify values that already exist on the lines of a List sublist, and you would use the Standard Mode sublist APIs to do so.

Examples of a List sublist are the Subscriptions sublist on a Customer or the Apply sublist on a Customer Payment.

Lastly, the Static List sublists are read-only and do not support SuiteScript. These are sublists that are typically used for displaying associated record data rather than child record data, meaning the data in a Static List is not actually part of the record itself (thus not accessible via SuiteScript).

An example of a Static List is the System Notes sublist on most record types.

For reference, you can find more on the types of sublists in Help.