Hi folks!

I have been asked a number of times about some of the Modifier with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) customizations featured on my blog and those over at Developing for Dynamics GP. It's no secret that I co-author a number of development posts with my friend David Musgrave in the spirit of educating and delivering some of the best articles to the end-user and development communities alike.

In light of this, this week I will deliver a 3-day Online Modifier with Visual Basic for Applications workshop, featured right here on this blog, that will step through a real-life customization from end to end.

What you will need

For the workshop, you will need a registered copy of Microsoft Dynamics GP v10, the Fabrikam sample company, and familiarity with the overall Dynamics GP navigation.

Prerequisites

This…

Named Printers is a module to allow controlling of the printer and settings used when printing reports.  It was originally developed for v3.00 by me while I was working for Sequel Technology (that's why the tables and calls are prefixed with ST).  Later it was purchased by Great Plains for v5.50 and included in core code (Dynamics.dic) for v6.00 onwards.

Named Printers works for any report that is set up to call Named Printers, but what happens when you want Named Printers control for a report that is currently not supported... Well, you…

We've released several free VBA addons for Dynamics GP ( click to email & email on customer maintenance addons). We've had several people ask us to show them how to install a VBA addon that modifies a screen or report. Here are the steps:

#1-Login to GP as SA.

#2-Click on Microsoft Dynamics GP > Tools > Customize > Customization Maintenance and import the package file we…

Well you learn something new every day and today our tame Dex developer is sat next to me in the office (some say he writes code in his sleep, others say he has dexterity tattooed on his heart, all we know is, he is called Jon) so picking up all sorts of things.


This one however is really simple and very useful. Often we will develop modifications for clients on our systems…

Well, I had been absent (more like out of ideas) from writing any new VBA articles. The truth is, they are hard to come by without giving away too many secrets. :-)

However, this one is worth giving away as I have seen many users request this feature to speed up data entry and processing. Take for example the Purchase Order Entry window. Won't you just like the ability to press some combination of keys on your keyboard to quickly access the Vendor Detail Entry window where you can quickly change around shipping methods, or other information needed? Well this example shows just that, but can be used to add shortcuts to any other button control in any other Dynamics GP window.

The solution is simple:

1) Add a pixel size button to the window with Modifier.




2) Caption the button. Buttons can have captions preceeded with the ampersand ("&") character, which in turn acts…

Overview

Welcome to the first installment of this 3-day workshop! The workshop will be conducted today Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The format is simple: get your laptop or PC with Dynamics GP 10.0 and follow the instructions below. Try to complete each section of the workshop and post your questions. That's it!

Today's workshop will focus on the essentials of Modifier by working with the Equipment Maintenance window in the Field Service series. The topics to be covered are as follow:

• Adding a window to Modifier
• Adding extra fields and controls to a modified window
• Working with field properties
• Linking fields to prompts
• Linking lookups to fields
• Granting security to modified windows

Modifying the Equipment Maintenance Window

The Equipment Maitenance window will require a new field, the Regulatory Entity, and a new Lookup button that will call our Customer Lookup window.

1) Open the Equipment Maintenance window. Go to Cards > Field Service > Equipment.

2) From Tools menu, select Customize, then choose Modify Current Window to open Modifier

3) Click the Static Text tool on the Toolbox window to add…

With password policies in place in Dynamics 10.0 RTM, it was easy to be able for your user to 'lock themselves out' after a mistyped password or two. 

Because Dynamics GP doesn't give you any kind of warning that the Caps Lock key is enabled, the user wouldn't necessarily notice this is the real issue and not a typo and all of a sudden you are locked out. 

With 10.0 SP2 and the change on how Dexterity/GP tries to login; this is less of a challenge but it still is possible for the user to lock themselves out of Dynamics GP because they left the Caps Lock key on. 

To solve this, I wrote some VBA code that works on the Login window in Dynamics GP.  It is somewhat advanced…

From the Translating Dexterity Applications Series. 

The final topic in the series is one that was added later after I was asked about how to handle translated applications when writing customizations.

Most code would work fine as it is independent of the language. However, it is common in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) customizations to read the prompt from a dialog using the Window_AfterModalDialog() event and take action based on the prompt text.  On a translated system this text will differ.

The solution is that you would need to look for the prompt in each language.  You can use a select case statement as shown in the…

Microsoft Dynamics GP uses concurrent licensing which provides for a maximum number of users logged into the system at any one time.  Each time a user logs into a company, one license is used.

On systems with more than one company, users may use multiple instances of the application running on their system to log into a number of companies at the same time.  This might use up more licenses than expected and thus…

Welcome to the second day of our Modifier with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) workshop!

Today we will dive into adding objects (windows and fields) to VBA. This will set us one step closer to our final project. We will also be adding our first lines of code. Today's workshop will cover the following topics:

• Adding windows and fields to VBA
• Setting up cross-dictionary references with VBA
• Adding code with the VBA code editor

Lets recap

In the previous session we added some extra controls (a field, a lookup button, and a zoom button) to the Equipment Maintenance window. We also explored linking the field to its prompt and the lookup to its field. This is especially important if we want to provide some extra capabilities to our project. After all, you never know who will customize our customization. For more information check my previous article "The importance of linking your fields to their prompts.

ADDING WINDOWS AND FIELDS TO VBA

For our project, we will need to add the Equipment Maintenance window to VBA, along with the controls we created. In addition, we will need to have our lookup button call the Customer Lookup window in the SmartList dictionary. This means that we will also need to add this window to the VBA project.

To add the Equipment Maintenance window to VBA follow these instructions:

1) Open the Equipment Maintenance window. Go to Cards > Field Service > Equipment
















* Click image to enlarge - Equipment Maintenance window

2) From the window Tools menu, select Customize > Add Current Window to Visual Basic. I am also a fan of shortcuts, so you could have also pressed CTRL + F11 on your keyboard. Now you have added your window to VBA... very simple!

3) To add the fields, we will press Shift + F11 on your keyboard. The system will change the mouse cursor to a visual cue that will indicate that the Add Fields mode is on. Click on the following controls:

a) The zoom button - Rem…

I was very intrigued by the Menus for Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Dynamics GP (VSTM) application created by my friend David Musgrave. I studied the sample code provided in the PDF documentation submitted with the product and after a few hours of careful reading, it dawned on me that if I could expose the VSTM assembly to COM interop other developers, including VBA developers could also have their native VBA forms called as part of Dynamics GP menus. After a few attempts over a few days to register the assembly with COM by using the Microsoft Assembly Registration tool, I abandoned the effort due to an existing issue registering the Microsoft.Dexterity.Bridge assembly which is referenced within the VSTM assembly to be able to make calls to Dexterity.

This however, did not discourage me from seeking other alternatives. Going back to basics, I realized that the VSTM assembly methods are just references to function scripts implemented within the VSTM dexterity dictionary. In fact, these function scripts could be called via the Dynamics Continuum Integration Library as they had corresponding names to the methods exposed in the VSTM assembly.

After this "eureka" moment, I got on a conference call with David at 1:00 AM EST on Wednesday last week and asked him if VSTM could be leveraged from VBA to facilitate adding native VBA forms to the standard GP menus. After about 1 hour of brainstorming and debating the implementation, the deal was sealed! So off I went to work on a proof of concept.

My first attempt was very rudimentary as with all POCs, since I could only articulate so much of how VSTM really worked under the hood. However, one thing was still pretty clear: the registration of the menus had to occur during the lauch of GP. I thought I could use some sort of Toobar event to register my menus, but I was wrong. While I was able to register the event with the Toolbar's Window_AfterOpen event, the menus would not show. After a few exchanges with David, he pointed me in the right direction.

The Challenges

To understand…