Today, I started the morning with a support call with a US customer and partner regarding what appeared to be a performance issue caused by GP Power Tools.
Once we used GP Power Tools to troubleshoot and identify the root cause of the issue, it was easy to see why they incorrectly thought the problem was caused by GP Power Tools.
Read on to understand what happened and how to make sure it does not happen on your systems ….
This article and sample GP Power Tools project comes about after hearing about a disturbing situation that has resulted in an unsuspecting Australian business receiving a surprise $100,000 tax bill.
The sample project code provided at the bottom of this article was created to help ensure that Australian Microsoft Dynamics GP sites don’t get caught out in the same way.
I have been asked many times about integrating data using GP Power Tools. While this is not what GP Power Tools – Developer Tools module was originally designed to do, it can be used to integrate data (for both adding and updating records).
The main reason for writing this article and creating the updated project was because a friend asking for a quick method for updating Item List Price information because their suppliers are providing new pricing information on a weekly (or less) basis.
The IMPORT_EXAMPLE Project take an original example script and massively improves on its capabilities to make it really simple method to integrate data for Accounts, Customers, Vendors and Items from a CSV (Comma Separated Values) text file. The file can be edited with Excel or your favourite text editor.
This article covers the latest “Must Have” free sample project for the GP Power Tools – Developer Tools module (requires Build 28 or later).
Back in 2012, I created code to obscure customer credit card details (see more information below). Using the same concepts, I have now created a project to obscure Bank Account Numbers for Checkbooks, Customers, Vendors and Employees.
Whether you have a requirement (see NACHA Security Requirements article) or not, best practice would be to make sure that Bank Account Numbers in your system are not human readable while stored in the database.
After three week’s work, I am thrilled to be releasing a second version of the Free SQL Search Lookups Example. Based on feedback from a number of users, the code for this example has been significantly improved and extended. It even now has an optional Automatic Selection mode for when there is only one record returned.
Please see the GP Power Tools Samples page for additional examples that you can download and use for free.
To give you an idea of how much it has changed, the old exported dbg.xml file was 321KB and the new one is 929KB. Read on to learn about all the changes made ….
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A while back there was a forum post on the Community Forum asking how to stop the Vendor ID from automatically populating with the previously entered Vendor ID when entering Payables Transactions.
This functionality can be useful when entering multiple transactions from a single vendor, but can also cause data entry errors if entering a transaction from a different vendor and the ‘Vendor ID’ is not changed.
At first glance I thought it would simply be caused by the ‘Vendor ID’ field on the window having the object property of SavedOnRestart=True. However, that was not the case.
We had another interesting support case recently where administrator users were getting slow login performance after installing a Winthrop Development Consultants product. When a standard user logged in they did not experience any delays.
The additional delay was around 90 to 120 seconds, after which everything would appear to work as normal.
This week we had a customer contact us after they changed the Proxy Settings which are part of the Registration System in all Winthrop Development Consultants products. After the change Microsoft Dynamics GP would crash on startup, probably because the settings were incorrect.
These settings should not normally be used as the Winthrop Development Consultants registration system (which uses Quick License Manager from Soraco Technologies) can normally work with the same internet connection as needed for standard web browsing.
In my previous article I discussed a method I have developed for Iterating through a Dexterity Scrolling Window.
This technique is something that has been requested many times as working with scrolling windows from the user interface side has always been extremely difficult. Especially when trying to reference it as a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) or VS Tools (Visual Studio Tools) “Grid”.
This article provides a real life example implemented using GP Power Tools (build 28 or later).
Over a year ago, October 2020 to be exact, I mentioned on a forum post that I have finally worked out how to cycle through a scrolling window using Dexterity code.
Being able to perform an action for each line in a scrolling window has been something that Microsoft Dynamics GP developers have been trying to do since VBA was added to version 4.0 of GP and Visual Studio Tools was added to version 9.0 of GP.
I promised I would blog about this technique … so read on for the details.
Over the last few days I have received a number of requests for clarification of the status of Winthrop Development Consultants’ products and whether they are at risk from the Java Log4J vulnerability that has been in the news recently.
The short answer is no.
For those who would like a bit more information read on…
Back in August 2006, while at Microsoft, I started development on a Dexterity based tool designed to use programmatic control Dexterity logging and table based triggers to capture three logs leading up to a non reproducible data error occurring in the tables. This was build 1 of the MBS Support Debugging Tool.
In September 2008, the renamed Support Debugging Tool (SDT) build 9 was released to the GP partner and customer community for them to use and help support their Microsoft Dynamics GP systems. For the next 6 years, I continued to work on the SDT pet project (builds 10 to 19) in my own time as it was not officially part of my role at Microsoft.
Winthrop Development Consultants are proud to be one of the sponsors of the K2A Days & GPUC event running in Fargo, North Dakota, USA (the home of Microsoft Dynamics GP) this week.
The event is hosted by Implementation Specialists and for the first two days focusses on Key2Act (formerly Wennsoft) customers with the final three days covering everything Microsoft Dynamics GP.
Winthrop Development Consultants are proud to be one of the sponsors of the K2A Days & GPUC event running this week in Fargo, North Dakota (the home of Microsoft Dynamics GP) and virtually.
The event is hosted by Implementation Specialists and for the first two days focusses on Key2Act (formerly Wennsoft) customers with the final three days covering everything Microsoft Dynamics GP.
The latest version of Microsoft Dynamics GP was released yesterday and it contains many new features and bug fixes. Winthrop Development Consultants has already updated its products for this Microsoft Dynamics GP – October 2021 release. They are now built against the final build and so are no longer beta builds (except for GP Power Tools which has a new build 29 coming soon).
Check out the previous article for more information:
Today’s article comes about because I was asked if GP Power Tools could easily assign a Security Role to all users in all companies in a Microsoft Dynamics GP system.
GP Power Tools does have a copy feature in the Enhanced Security window which can copy all security settings from a selected user/company to all users in the same company or all companies for the same user, but it does not have the option to push a specific Security Role ID across the entire system.
No problem. We can just use the Developer Tools module to create this functionality in an hour or two.
As a follow on from yesterday’s article on how different languages can be used to drive the Microsoft Dynamics GP user interface, this article discusses the need to move away from the old Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) way of thinking. If you missed yesterday’s article, here is the link.
Now that VBA is “End of Life” and many sites are starting to use GP Power Tools – Developer Tools module to replace the VBA business logic with GP Power Tools triggers and scripts. However some developers are still trying to write code as though they were still limited by VBA rather than leveraging the more powerful capabilities of GP Power Tools and Dexterity.
Awesome News.
This morning (Perth Time) I had an email from Terry Heley from Microsoft with a link to a pre-release (very early alpha) of the upcoming Microsoft Dynamics GP version 18.4 (October 2021) release. This download is provided to the ISV community to help them prepare for the final code when it is released.
A long time customer recently asked if they could get a second Salesperson ID associated with a customer on the Customer Maintenance (RM_Customer_Maintenance) window using GP Power Tools.
There is already really good guide for adding custom fields to windows and reports published (see article: #GPPT Beginner’s Guide to Adding Custom Fields), but that example does not add a field linked to an existing table and so does not have the standard GP features of a lookup button, a zoom button and on-the-fly adding of records.
IMPORTANT: This example uses functionality only available in GP Power Tools Build 28.9.
A recent post on the GPUG (Dynamic Communities) forums asked How to change the default sort order for Item History. The Item History (IV_Item_History) window in Microsoft Dynamics GP shows period summary data from the IV_SUM_HIST_Period (IV30102) table based on the Item Number, Site ID and date range on ascending period basis.
This means that once you have a data for a number of periods, the latest data is always at the bottom of the window and will require the user to scroll down to the bottom to view it.
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