Customizing Dynamics Gp Or Going Beyond First Page Flashes And Graphs

In recent years we saw large number of internet publications where term customization

is about showing on the first page or modifying to-dos, quick links, metrics, reports and Outlook plugins. These are cool options which do not require single line of code. In our consulting practice we realized that large portion of customers does not care and some customers are annoyed by these plugins as login time is increased. For couple of clients we even had to take them all off. Lets talk about real customizing tools:

1.Modifier with VBA scripting. It does what its name suggests. And here you may get by also without coding if you only need to change field position, place graphics on the window or move the field outside of the visible area. If that is all then it might be considered end user friendly. However if you are programmer then you may create new fields and associate VBA scripts with their events. And you can go even further by including Dexterity Sanscript scriptlets inside VBA. You can do so-called cross dictionary development which is kind of difficult in pure Dexterity. Sorry for mentioning something before introduction. Please see it below

2.Extender. Opposite to Modifier it adds forms, tables, etc. Enterprise version available from original development firm eOne also allows Sanscript code but without debugging. Reasonably easy to use for somebody programming in IT department. If you plan something like Crystal reports on extended tables then SQL View would be something not easy to create or maybe even say like a puzzle. This is because table name is generated automatically

3.Integration Manager. It is strongly recommended for initial data migration as well as ongoing integration with simple EDI, custom ecommerce shopping cart, etc. Probably not for accounting department folks but IT people should be able to setup integration without code. Even if you are software developer you can alter integration logic in VBA in events. If you have custom ecommerce portal with your in-house programmed shopping cart we recommend IM scheduled to fire every maybe five minutes or half an hour. But if you would like to do all the job in Microsoft Visual Studio then see the next one

4.eConnect. There are several layers and you might be confused reading whitepapers and documentation. The idea is simple in our opinion. Instead of creating, modifying and deleting master records and documents in client application you can call in VB, C++ or C# methods that do the same job but manipulating documents through encrypted SQL stored procedures (where client application is usually coded in Dex we will review it below)

5.Dynamics GP Dexterity. This is Integrated Development Environment with its own semi-proprietary scripting language Sanscript. By its idea it is the shell which abstracts Great Plains modules from such unstable technologies as Operating System (currently supports MS Windows only but in time it was available on Mac as well), Database Platform (at this time Microsoft SQL Server exclusively but it was available on Pervasive SQL 2000/Btrieve and Ctree). Dex is probably not for internal IT as you need dedicated professional to do the job

After this introduction lets take and answer several questions:

Q. We tried to change existing table IV00101 Inventory Item Master and add few new fields. We were not able to distribute this modification to users

A. Core tables described in Dynamics.dic you should not modify. Customization is distributed through packaging into chunk file technology which doesnt pick existing tables but only new ones. Theoretically it might be possible to distribute modified Dynamics.dic file to all the users but nobody does this. It might work but next version update will wipe out your user defined fields. Simply add new table and link it by IV00101 primary key (Item ID)

Q. We have our ecommerce portal hosted in Linux. It is on MySQL and programming was done in PHP. How do we import shopping cart in the form of customer invoice paid by credit card?

A. You can use several technologies. We had similar project where in PHP shopping cart was exported into text file (CSV) and then IM was picking it up every five minutes with archiving original CSV and success/error logging. Think about direct ODBC connection from Integration Manager to PHP (we are not experts in PHP however). The third option is XML SOAP Web Service project in Visual Studio with eConnect libraries. Then you call web service from your PHP application

For additional information please call us: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us: help@albaspectrum.com

by: Andrew Karasev

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