Mystery of Qty Allocated & field name ATYALLOC
In Dynamics GP the inventory quantity allocated has a field name of “ATYALLOC”. You can see it lurking in IV00102 table, as a decimal (19,5). .
Why is is named ATYALLOC?
A field typed day in and day out, I ponder each time it is why it was named so. After all, would we not expect it to be named “QTYALLOC”, so tell me where did that “A” come from?
My horrific assumption is that this was a typo, the Q and A key on a keyboard being so close together, please let me be wrong. Did such an error get through QA back in the dark days of software development?
I have the feeling there may be a back story to this naming that someone on the inside may be able to tell us about. Perhaps there was a conflict with another field, or some obscure reason it was named so?
Please comment if you can add anything to this mystery…or simply that I’m stupid for not seeing some obvious reason!
[updated 25th Oct 2015] The legend…
.. so I was listening to The Enterprise Software Podcast Episode 28 featuring Ed Kless https://twitter.com/edkless where he turned a myth into legend, Ed mentioned the ATYALLOC field and had a story about it. This was really odd as the podcast was in Aug and I independently posted this post without knowing about it in the September – bizarre!
Ed said,
“I think I have the corrected legend”
Ed goes on to explain that Mitch Ruud, former manager of technologies at Great Plains Software https://www.linkedin.com/in/mruud told him the origin of this field name.
Ed continued, “He {Mich Ruud} was ‘Demo God’, he was the man for OLAP cubes”,
“...it was a pain at the time, you'd bring up the list of fields, and there was like 200 fields. He had to scroll so far down that it took like forever. It was messing up his demo. So he said,
‘what we need to do is temporarily make one of these an A so I can easily find it and it will make it much easier to do the demo.’
So they did it and it {the field} mistakenly found its way into {a production} build and it remains there today...”
Well there we have it, this field has its own legend! –I’d love to know if anyone out there can verify this with Mitch! If there are any other variations on the story let me know! Personally I have doubts about the validity of this story, as David in the comments of this post indicates it is not easy to rename a Dexterity field. My question is, would they really rename a field just to make a demo quicker? Why would you rename just one field for a demo, and if you were to, would it really be qty allocated, are there not more interesting fields to demo?