Cross Dictionary Development with Microsoft Dexterity

When I first started working in 1996 as a Software Development Engineer on the Dynamics GP Spanish release for Latin America project in Colombia for my former company Nucleus S.A. -- a Microsoft regional partner at the time -- I was challenged by a number of puzzling coding issues that seem to have no solution. Our inability to access third party dictionary information interactively with Dynamics GP was the absolutely most disappointing issue we faced since we had great plans for integrating Fixed Assets (back then a Forestar product) with GP for some Latin American localizations needed at the time. Those issues propagated over a period of 2 years, and during the time our only possibilities were database triggers and stored procedures after the fact. I must say that I worked hand to hand with some of the most brilliant people on the International Team at the former Great Plains Software in getting the product off the ground from a development perspective: Tom Irsfeld, Dave Gaboury, Tadeuz Komorovski and Papa Ndoye.

It was not until 1998 when I traveled to Fargo, ND that I met David Musgrave for the first time. I attended his Integrating with Third Party Dictionaries session, becoming familiar with some not too ortodox, but highly effective methods (at the time) he engineered for accessing data on foreign third party forms and tables from Dynamics GP using Dexterity 4.0. His materials became the bible I (and many Dexterity programmers around the world) followed to train new developers and forward my career in the company as a Senior Software Architect. I also attended his conference in Summer of 2000 where he unleashed other cross dictionary techniques that until today are still considered the absolute best practices.

I followed up with his Pushing the Limits with Dexterity which he co-hosted with Mark Rockwell from Rockton Software in 2002. By then, Dexterity had gained new functionalities from a scripting perspective and it was showing its maturity.

David and Mark have always made these conference materials available from each of their sites, but you can now download directly from David's blog.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MIS, MVP, MCP, PMP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DBMS: 12 Microsoft Dynamics GP: 0 error when updating to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2

Image
Hello all! It's been quite a while since I've actually written anything of remote interest to anyone who follows my blog, but at the same time, you will be pleased to know that I've been quite busy in the consulting front, with upgrades, server migrations, complex multi-instance postings involving 10's of thousands of transactions, wrapping up some Field Service Automation projects, and the list goes on and on. This time around I want to bring to the forefront, an issue I encountered updating  from Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 SP2 to Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 R2 plus the latest service pack. Background My client requested a server migration to a new environment where they wanted to deploy Dynamics GP 2013 R2 web client (plus the latest service pack) and upgrade their relational database management system to Microsoft SQL Server 2014. This is something I'm absolutely comfortable with (for the most part) given also that my client was sitting at Microsoft Dynamics...
Read more

Do I have to use those "Z-" currency IDs in GP?

Image
I know this seems like a trivia question, but recently I have come across a number of clients who have been using Microsoft Dynamics GP for a number of years and have been told by their former partners that they *must* use the predefined currency IDs created after adding the sample company, with no real explanation to support these claims. Case in point, my new client in Saudi Arabia, has been struggling for years to understand why they were told to prefix all currency IDs with the "Z-". So they went ahead and setup "Z-SR" for the Saudi Real. If you are familiar with Microsoft Dynamics GP and the sample company, Fabrikam, you may have noticed by now that after adding the sample company (which is not a requirement by any means), you will get a number of predefined currencies such as Z-US$ (US Dollars), Z-UK (British Pounds), Z-C$ (Canadian Dollars), Z-AUD (Australian Dollars), and so forth, accompanied by a number of exchange rate tables. If you are not familiar wi...
Read more

Microsoft Dynamics GP Scrolling Windows and Line Sequence Numbers

Image
I thought I would write about something meaningless that no one really thinks about. However, I realized that this is a compelling topic since it makes for some interesting discussion around the ability to insert line items withinin most transaction scrolling windows. Let’s take some time to understand where Line Sequence Numbers come from. A Line Sequence Number is auto generated by Dynamics GP and uses a seed value of 16,384 as a basis for the first line. Each subsequent line in the scrolling window is incremented by this number, so line number 2 would have a Line Sequence Number value of 32,768, line number 3 would have Line Sequence Number Value of 49,152, and so on. Since most GP transaction entry scrolling windows allow inserting rows in between line items, the newly inserted Line Sequence Number value is calculated as an average between the previous and the next line item sequences, i.e., if you were to insert an item in between row 1 and row 2 in the scrolling window -- keep in...
Read more