Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant
I have many other outside work items competing for my time at the moment which, combined with being busy at work is leaving me little time for reviewing. To that end I’m snatching an hour while sat at a hotel in the Midlands (South Yorkshire to be exact) to add another part to my review of Leslie Vail’s book Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications published in October by Packt Publishing;
I started reviewing Leslie Vail’s book, Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications,which was published at the end of December by Packt Publishing, a few weeks ago. To do this review I decided to take a read through and complete all the examples she gives on developing an application as I’ve only had very limited experience with Dexterity;
Today I’m taking a look at Chapter 5 which covers sanScript and how to add it to windows to enable the required functionality. The key topics to be covered are:
After slacking off a lot in terms of reviewing Leslie Vail’s book Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications, which was published at the end of December by Packt Publishing, I’m going to try to get a regular tempo of review posts going. Today I’m here with the review for chapter 4;
This chapter is all about Building the User Interface which Leslie does by getting the reader to build an interface for customer contacts integration and covers:
So from this chapter I expect to get a good grounding in creating an entirely new window which should look like this:
Things have been very hectic recently and I’ve found myself slacking off from reviewing Leslie’s book Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications which was published at the end of December by Packt Publishing;
Well, I now have a bit more time so I’ve returned to the book to take a look at chapter 3, Getting Started with Dexterity which gives a thorough look at Dexterity; how to install it’s development environment, what the components are and how they hang together and the pitfalls to watch out for.
At the end of December, Developing Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Applications, written by Leslie Vail and published by Packt Publishing was released.
I got a copy of the book in order to do a review and have decided to break the review down into multiple parts. The reason for this is that the book includes some practical examples which I have decided to do and then include the results of this in the review; after all if it is a book on developing how can you accurately review the book if you don’t use what you learn to build something?
The book is aimed at developers new to working with Microsoft Dynamics GP, so bear in mind that I am not a developer when reading my reviews. Quick synopsis of my background: I started my career as a trainee developer and moved through a variety of roles such as developer and support analyst before moving to my current position as consultant and project manager.
I oversee development teams working on additions or amendments to Microsoft Dynamics GP as well as personally undertaking some modifications using Report Writer or Modifier with VBA. So despite not being a developer, I am used to working with them and did, once upon a time, be one myself.
The first chapter of the book covers the Microsoft Dynamics GP Architecture from a high level perspective.
It covers the history of the GP interface from it’s origins with Great Plains Software, an overview of Dexterity and the development environment. There is a detailed explanation of the launch file (Dynamics.set), which included a couple of points of which I wasn’t aware, and the configuration/preferences file (Dex.ini).
The explanation of the Dex.ini file included the ExportOneLineBody switch which I didn’t know about, but for which I have an immediate use.
Leslie then goes on to explain about the structure of the tables in the SQL Database which always strikes newcomers as arcane and overly complex. Leslie explains this well with plenty of detail on both the structure, including both the physical and technical names, and how transactions move between tables as their state changes.
Chapter 1 wraps up with a detailed explanation of the UI covering how forms are constructed, how the scrolling windows work and the common buttons used on forms, scrolling windows and individual buttons.
The second chapter of the book focuses on the fundamentals of integrating applications with Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 ships with a variety of other software such as Business Analyzer (about which I have posted the installation and configuration steps) and also one called Integration Manager.
Integration Manager is a utility which can be used to load data into Microsoft Dynamics GP on a manually basis. Data can be loaded from text file, XML or directly from a database using an ODBC connection. Integration Manager is a better option that the Table Import () routine because it enforces data integrity.
Integration Manager in Microsoft Dynamics GP is available for implementation for 120 days after which it must be purchased as part of the Customization Pack (prior to Dynamics GP 2013 it could be purchased as part of the Integration Suite).
There are a two adapters available for Integration Manager; Dynamics GP and eConnect. The latter adapter requires another Microsoft product to be installed so this how-to will focus only on the former.
Integration Manager is installed from the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 setup utility;
One of the points I make (repeatedly until I see a confirmation they’ve done so) to clients when implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP is that they need to make sure that a maintenance backup of the SQL databases and other resources are being made.
In some cases the maintenance backup is a once a night job, other clients have had one done every twelve hours with log backups made every hour. As long as a regular backup is being made I’m happy and stop nagging them.
On the Developing for Microsoft Dynamics GP blog, David Musgrave has posted an announcement that Microsoft Dynamics GP Service Pack 3 is now available.
As always with service packs to Microsoft Dynamics GP there are a multitude of downloads covering all the different related products to Dynamics GP itself such as Integration Manager and eConnect.
Well, they do say the old ones are the best. I recently installed Microsoft Dynamics GP on a client site and encountered the below error message when starting Integration Manager for the first time;
A client doing some work with Integration Manager 10 recently reported the following error when trying to load the VB Script Editor;
