How to roll down changes to SOP's Requested Ship Date to line items and purchase orders

Business Situation

A sales order entry clerk has been instructed to change all requested ship dates on a 100-line item sales order. This sales order is also linked to a purchase order for the 100 line items. However, the clerk has discovered that Dynamics GP will not allow these changes to take effect by changing only the Requested Ship Date on the transaction header and must go into each line item to accomodate the for the new request. In addition, the clerk must communicate to the company's buyer that all line items on the PO must be changed to meet the new Required Date.

Solution

It would be much easier sometimes if certain Dynamics GP functionality was available out-of-the-box. However, that would leave a lot of us without a job :-).

Throughout the application, we get so many messages about rolling down changes across multiple records, but SOP seems to be one of those modules where rolling down changes to line items don't seem to be a choice. Take for example Requested Ship Date field. Over and over, I have seem so many newsgroup posts asking for this feature. There are typically two approaches: a) you can create a SQL Server trigger to address the changes when the Requested Ship Date is updated from the SOP document header, or b) you can create a VBA customization that will ask to rolldown the changes, and if the user acknowledges, then run a stored procedure to make these changes happen.















I like both approaches, however approach (b) provides ample flexibility and allows for an interactive user experience. In this article, I will address option (a) and will follow up -- in a second article -- with option (b).

So let's take a look at our SQL Server trigger first.

CREATE TRIGGER dbo.sopRollDownReqShipDate ON SOP10100 AFTER UPDATE AS
IF UPDATE(ReqShipDate)
BEGIN
 BEGIN TRAN

  -- roll down to all items
  UPDATE A WITH (ROWLOCK) SET A.ReqShipDate = I.ReqShipDate
  FROM SOP10200 A INNER JOIN INSERTED I ON (A.SOPNUMBE = I.SOPNUMBE) AND (A.SOPTYPE = I.SOPTYPE) AND (I.SOPTYPE IN (2, 3)) -- only orders and invoices

  -- updated the Required Date column for linked POs
  UPDATE A WITH (ROWLOCK) SET A.REQDATE = I.ReqShipDate
  FROM POP10100 A INNER JOIN SOP60100 B ON (A.PONUMBER = B.PONUMBER) 
   INNER JOIN INSERTED I ON (B.SOPNUMBE = I.SOPNUMBE) AND (B.SOPTYPE = I.SOPTYPE) AND (I.SOPTYPE IN (2, 3)) -- only orders and invoices

  -- updated the Required Date column for the line items on linked POs
  UPDATE A WITH (ROWLOCK) SET A.REQDATE = I.ReqShipDate
  FROM POP10110 A INNER JOIN SOP60100 B ON (A.PONUMBER = B.PONUMBER) AND (A.ORD = B.ORD)
   INNER JOIN INSERTED I ON (B.SOPNUMBE = I.SOPNUMBE) AND (B.SOPTYPE = I.SOPTYPE) AND (I.SOPTYPE IN (2, 3)) -- only orders and invoices

 IF @@ERROR <> 0
  COMMIT TRAN
 ELSE
  ROLLBACK TRAN
END
GO

Let study our trigger for a bit. By using a BEGIN TRAN and checking for errors before committing out transaction, with SQL Server's @@ERROR global variable, we are ensuring that our trigger will work as a single block of code. This is, we are only committing all changes if the updates were all successful.

By performing an UPDATE A WITH (ROWLOCK), we are allowing our trigger exclusive access to the rows involved in the update. This will prevent other changes from taking place on these rows while our trigger attempts to change the records.

Finally, our DML trigger makes use of the INSERTED special table to account for all header records being modified at once. You may say, well sales orders and invoices are updated one at a time in GP. This is true, but if you have an integration that insert records in bulk as part of a transaction, say for example orders coming from a CRM system through a BizTalk orchestration, you may need to address all these orders as one transaction block instead of individually. Also, working with INSERTED prevents the use of SQL Server cursors and allow the use of a set-based approach to our implementation.

Please stay tuned for the follow up post!

Until next post!

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