Dynamics GP How to Deploy Multiple Invoice Forms in Report Writer
Historically Great Plains Dynamics dictionary has only three Sales Invoice forms: blank, short and long. You may find yourself in the scenario, where your system has, let’s say – more than ten companies, each has its own graphical logo and you need the way to print invoices for all these companies. You consultant might suggest something like that – save various Reports.dic dictionaries on the server, where each is dedicated to the specific company and then swap dictionaries, when you plan to print invoices. It probably doesn’t sound like an excellent idea. There is another more elegant way of achieving the same results – export packages. Let us walk you through:
1. Exporting the package. Let’s now assume that you just created nice SOP Blank Invoice form for company A and ready to export it into package. Tools -> Customize -> Customization Maintenance. And in the list you should see all your modified reports and even forms (if you are using Modifier as well). Highlight SOP Blank Invoice form and hit Export button. We recommend you to name the package with the abbreviation of the company to be able to find it in the future
2. Loading the package. OK, let’s now assume that few weeks down the road you need to print invoice for the company A. Open Customization Maintenance screen, see paragraph above, click Import button and find the package for the company A. The import will just replace in your active Reports.dic SOP Blank Invoice form and it will not touch other respected modified reports
3. Some additional recommendations. It was known fact and it is still probably the case even for the newest versions 2010 and 10.0 – reports dictionary might become corrupt, when you are reloading the report, while other users are in the system. We recommend you to consider two strategies. First – instead of using the dictionary from the network (it is defined in Dynamics.set file), consider switching the users, printing invoices to local copies of the dictionary. This approach should minimize dictionary file corruption. Second strategy – always keep backup version of the dictionary, if corruption happens, you should be able to reload the file from backup
4. Reports dictionary repair. When the dictionary file is corrupt, you may get very strange error messages, especially when printing reports. Doing consulting job for this Corporate ERP system we found that one of the first things to check is to recreate reports dictionary. Have all the users log off, locate Reports.dic file, and rename it. Then login GP, open Report Writer, select main product, then Reports button on the toolbar. In the window click on Import button and locate your renamed old dictionary, and import reports. This process will create new Reports.dic file and moves all the definitions into it
5. Older versions. We believe that packages were introduced around version 7.0. If you are on the earlier version: 6.0, 5.5, 5.0, 4.0 or on Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows or Mac – you just got what you paid for many years ago. However there is the option to upgrade your old Dynamics to the current version 2010, expect several steps. You can also use the strategy, described in the introduction part of the article, it is not applicable to GPA for DOS, Windows and Mac
6. International versions of the Invoice form. In the RW you can translate text fields of the report into foreign language. Important things to know – Dexterity architecture supports only ASCII compliant languages (one byte = eight bits) and doesn’t support Unicode (two bytes = sixteen bits). ASCII compliant are all European languages, including Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Spanish, Portuguese; plus Arabic (Farsi and Dari are also here, as they are based on Arabic alphabet). Unicode based languages include the set of languages with hieroglyphs: Chinese, Japanese, Korean – here we recommend you to look at such add-on as NJ Star, where you have some limited support for hieroglyphs
7. Packages and Small Business Financials. As you may be aware – SBF product line was terminated, and the last version available is 9.0. Reports design was a bit tricky in SBF. We used the following technique: export package from Small Business Financials, reload it on the consultant laptop regular Dynamics GP, edit it there, export and reload back on the Small Business Financials. This methodic allows you to enjoy such features are graphical versions of the report in Small Business Financials
Source by Andrew Karasev