After installing security advisory 960715 , Microsoft Dynamics GP clients went down. This happens on log in to GP, raising exceptions due to missing objects.

It turns out that there are still a few VBA forms used by the GP instance that have not yet been migrated to .NET. These forms used the msdatgrd.ocx control and some others to that it turns out have been identified as having security flaws. There is a mechanism in place that allows a “kill bit” to be issued against an Active X control to kill it off. This is one of the things the security update does, killing your application that uses these controls.

The was not entirely clear a few months ago when the issue was first encountered, but since then research explained the corrective actions required. Basically installing the newer version of Visual Studio 6 installs the newer safe controls into the windows system32 directory. Deleting the cache copies of these controls from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Forms\ (*.exd) and regsvr32ing the controls sorts it all out.

You must have developer rights to the control i.e. Visual Studio. Luckily since I worked all this out the Visual Studio Office Developer (VSOD) Support Team have put together a comprehensive summary of all the information and guidance required to tackle this issue on these pages here. http://blogs.msdn.com/vsod/archive/2009/06/05/visual-basic-6-controls-stop-working-after-security-advisory-960715.aspx

Meanwhile these VBA forms are to be made redundant by moving them to .NET, exposed through COM Callable Wrapper (CCW).

Price list download

Recently the need to provide a link to download prices from our corporate website arose. Generally I like to keep things simple, so the obvious thing to do was to squirt the data into a csv file in to the response stream to the browser. However there was a desire to include other elements for Microsoft Excel users, like the “=HYPERLINK(“https://www.timwappat.info/”,”Tims site”)” type formulas.

I checked out so see the discussions on Stackoverflow, the view I derived from there was that SpreadsheetML was the way forward as a download format. I also kept in the csv for those users with older software.

SpreadsheetML

This is the XML format used by excel. The excel document is broken up into multiple xml files that normalise the data and make it possible for millions of cells to be held in a sensible manner. The collection of files are then zipped up and given the xlsx file extension. It is this archive that becomes the spreadsheet excel “file”.

Microsoft have released a SDK that allows developers to work with the xml files. The SDK can be downloaded from here: Open XML Format SDK 2.0

By referencing the .dll files in the SDK in your Visual Studio 2008+ project, the open XML namespaces become available to you. A good introduction is here: Dive into SpreadsheetML (Part 1 of 2)

Structure of XML using Microsoft XML Notepad:

You can see from the screen shot the structure drilling down to an individual text cell.

Create the template

To create a template file to make things a little easier. This is done by creating an Excel document that is formatted and contains everything you need bar the data you wish to manipulate. This all could be done by using code, but easier to just use Excel.

Creating Documents by Using the Open XML Format SDK 2.0 (Part 1 of 3)

The above link is useful to get a introduction to basic manipulation of the documents. Once installed the SDK also has a help file containing some good examples of basic and medium level interactions with documents.

Populate the template document

Microsoft are promoting LINQ by using it as the data technology stack behind the OPEN XML examples they provide. The code is quite readable, working much as you would expect.
There is not much online regarding the creating of formulas in sheets, but it turned out quite easy as you can see in the code. One issue that seems to affect a lot of people is how to get any formula you enter to recalculate on opening the sheet. This turns out to be done by ensuring the VALUE of the formula cell is null/nothing. If a value already exists then the sheet will use that cached value else a refresh of the formula occurs.

Private Function CreateFormulaCell(ByVal Header As String, ByVal value As String, ByVal Index As Integer) As Cell
    Dim newCell As Cell = New Cell(New CellFormula(value), Nothing)
    newCell.CellReference = Header & Index
    Return newCell
End Function

I’ve just spent a few hours this morning working on a drop down menu for the website. It works a little like the Microsoft Vista file browser address bar. Any part of the breadcrumb type trail can be clicked on to drop down the other categories at that level.

Since I’ve upgraded the website SQL server earlier in the year from 2000 to 2008 version of SQL server I now can utilise Common Table Expressions to get the solution (CTE). Used in a recursive manner you can do all sorts that needed cursors before – great stuff!

Here was my resulting script before packaging into a  stored procedure:

-- Script to get all the categories from a given category up over 

-- includes a mark against the path we are on and other categories at that level.

-- T.WAPPAT 20th July 2009

---

DECLARE @CatID Integer

SET @CatID=22141

WITH CategoryParents(CatID, ParentCatID, SortInLevel, 

                            CatLangCode, CatDesc, InPath,  Depth)

AS

(

--Anchor member

SELECT    CategoriesSibs.CatID as CatID, CategoriesSibs.ParentCatID,

        CategoriesSibs.SortInLevel, CategoriesDesc.CatLangCode, 

        CategoriesDesc.CatDesc, 

        CASE CategoriesSibs.CatID WHEN @CatID 

            THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as InPath,

        0 as Depth

FROM  MA_Categories AS Categories WITH (NOLOCK)   

      JOIN 

      MA_Categories as CategoriesChild WITH (NOLOCK) 

        ON CategoriesChild.ParentCatID=Categories.CatID

      JOIN 

      MA_Categories as CategoriesSibs WITH (NOLOCK) 

        ON CategoriesSibs.ParentCatID=Categories.CatID

      JOIN

      MA_CategoryDescs AS CategoriesDesc WITH (NOLOCK) 

        ON CategoriesDesc.CatID = CategoriesSibs.CatID 

WHERE CategoriesChild.CatID=@CatID

UNION ALL

--Recursive member

select  Categories.CatID, Categories.ParentCatID, 

        CategoriesSibs.SortInLevel, CategoriesDesc.CatLangCode,

        CategoriesDesc.CatDesc, 

        CASE CategoriesSibs.CatID WHEN CategoryPArents.ParentCatID 

            THEN 1 ELSE 0 END as InPath,

        Depth+1 as Depth

FROM         CategoryParents AS CategoryParents 

             JOIN 

             MA_Categories AS Categories WITH (NOLOCK) 

                ON CategoryParents.ParentCatID=Categories.CatID  

             JOIN

             MA_Categories as CategoriesSibs WITH (NOLOCK) 

                ON CategoriesSibs.ParentCatID=Categories.ParentCatID

                JOIN

             MA_CategoryDescs AS CategoriesDesc WITH (NOLOCK) 

                ON CategoriesDesc.CatID = CategoriesSibs.CatID  

)

-- execute CTE

select  distinct * from CategoryParents  ORDER BY Depth, SortinLevel

You may find this useful to hack around for your own purposes. The following are table definitions.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MA_Categories](

    [CatID] [int] NULL,

    [ParentCatID] [int] NULL,

    [SortInLevel] [int] NULL

) ON [PRIMARY]

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[MA_CategoryDescs](

    [CatID] [int] NULL,

    [CatLangCode] [varchar](3) NULL,

    [CatDesc] [varchar](200) NULL

) ON [PRIMARY]

Today we started thinking about ways that we could sell items from one company's inventory using another company's SOP module in Dynamics GP.

Problem outlined

We have two mail order companies selling, for example pet care items and a DIY store selling tools. We have a desire to offer some of the overlapping items to both companies putting sections in the websites and printed catalogues of items from the other company. All the items are held in the same physical real warehouse but are held in the respective company’s inventory module in GP. Both companies are on the same instance of SQL server.

Example: Some DIY customers might like to buy a rabbit hutch as it is sort of on the edge of that stores proposition. The pet store might want to offer small tool kits to help with fitting cat flaps etc.

Ideas

We have thought of creating a inventory enquiry screen in SOP document entry of GP that looks at a union of the two inventories to bring back stock levels and details. Thus the sales staff can see the stock no matter which company it is in.

To raise a sales order for a customer users  could enter a non-inventoried item into SOP as a drop ship order against the other company as the supplier.

We could then use eConnect to create a purchase order and sales order in the other company for the items that were ordered. This integration would have to also handle if items are cancelled or quantities changed on the order -hmmm.

Fulfilment

We have a custom solution in our warehouse that I wrote that handles fulfilment. This could produce a consolidated pick list across the two companies for orders that have been created this way. Users could fulfil both the drop ship sales order and the normal sales order when the consolidated pick list is fulfilled. Thus to the customer the fact that two different companies are fulfilling the order would be transparent.

What do you think?

Have you done something similar before, or got other ideas/products that would help, if so leave a comment…