What do you call that window GP?

Steve Endow mentioned on twitter the other day about the naming of objects in GP when programming. The inconstancies are astounding, I have to agree, you can spend half an hour trying to determine if the object named something almost like what you want is actually the object you want or not, then two mins to actually write the mod! The fact you end up using a tool to work out what the object name of the window is in the code, well that just tells the story.

What Steve might not realise is that it is even worse if you speak English rather than American. See that window he’s looking at in the tweet, look at it on my screen…

So we have Enquiry rather than Inquiry, no big deal? Well mostly no we learn the translations, but it confusing to the new developers who have to get used to this translations issue. Sometimes the translated terms are not as obvious as this. However even this would be an issue if you were looking at the object explorer ordered alphabetically or doing a search for the object.

There  is fun though with Debtors and Customers. I still don’t really know why we can’t have customers too, for our users it would make more sense than the accounting term debtors!

Steve kindly furnished me with this screen shot of an American GP customer window.

Compare that to what we see…with a English Debtor Window. These are the same windows, replacing customer everywhere, now imagine searching for this in visual studio, or a field called debtor id…

In visual studio when developing addins we have RMCustomerMaintenance, good job I didn’t go searching for debtor when looking for the object, eh?

So I conclude it is all fun and games developing visual studio addins for GP!

Thanks for Steve inspiring this post with his tweet and helping with the screen shot.