in a prior life I was lucky to be considered a SME or subject matter expert on the development/customization of the Infor CRM product. I am/was lucky enough to have not only supported for my end customers but also worked inside on the product through the years with Sage, Swiftpage and Infor. I am lucky enough to continue my relationship with both Swiftpage (Act!) and Infor to this day and they continue to have faith in mine and my teams development skills to deliver new features to their platforms.

One of the products that I was instrumental in was the Infor XBar outlook integration. Through the years it has had additional features added including some more deep outlook integration that is outside of the core XBar implementation that is developed and maintained by a different developer I continue to be one of the only developers in the world that knows how to customize XBar.

There is nothing more that I would like to see is  Infor CRM to continue to grow and attract new customers/users/developers so I have resolved to provide how to’s in this blog to spread some knowledge and hopefully in some small part move the Infor CRM ship forward.

Mark 

This week the long awaited update for Infor CRM was released. The release contains quite a few fixes which in most case would make it a no brainer to upgrade to. That being said Infor has changed their support policy for cloud based customers to now disallow direct access to the CRM environment after 8.4.0.1 has been installed. As such the openness of creating reports and managing the environment, including promoting customizations will become more complex and require more effort from the partner, and customer CRM support from making changes to the environment. If you do need to create many reports, or in the midst of a larger development effort it may be in your best interest to hold off on the 8.4.0.1 upgrade to manage any impacts. If you have any question do not hesitate to reach out to your partner, or Infor Support for more clarification or to create a plan to lower the impact of the change. Now if you Infor CRM environment is not hosted in the cloud then moving to 8.4.0.1 is our recommendation.

My close friends at CustomerFx has created a better write up then I have, and I will point you there if you wish a little more detail https://customerfx.com/article/infor-is-making-changes-to-remote-infor-crm-cloud-access/

Wow, long time since my last post. I guess its a mix of being busy on projects and being completely uninspired when it comes to writing any thing up here. This occurs mostly in the winter when I feel drained, and this winter has been pretty bad on me when it comes to my mental health. Thankfully we press through and just get stuff done.

Here at BITtelligent we focus on so many different things, and at times its hard to determine where the next focus point needs to be. Being a jack of all, with some razor focus on the SalesLogix product line I sometimes get lost without regards to the bigger picture. BITtelligent has become quite successful of late of SalesLogix web upgrades and almost have it down to a Science.

Over the next few months I hope to provide more details on the BITtelligent Integration Toolkit. A platform and set of services for creating custom/standalone integrations to various systems. Shortly we will be delivering our first mini-integration providing Microsoft Exchange to SalesLogix Ticket and History. We are very excited by these mini platform releases and hope to have a series of releases each year.

I will also be delving into SalesLogix 8. I have been fortunate enough to work with the team in Scottsdale on the product and provide hopefully great insight on how to get the most out of the platform.

Finally we at BITtelliigent will be adding some external competencies around ERP synchronizations specifically MAS90/200 and MAS500 through Dynalink and ERPLink product lines. Focusing on aiding support to the business partner and end customer community to get running and maintaining a working synchronization process.

List<string> list = new List<string>();

using (
       var cmd = new OleDbCommand(string.Format("slx_dbids('{0}', {1})", table, count), 
       connection)
)
{

   var r = cmd.ExecuteReader();

   while (r.Read())
   {
      list.Add(r.GetString(0));
   }

    r.Close();
 }

return list;

Now within the SalesLogix web client infrastructure it is a actually easier if you know where to look.

The framework exposes a service – SalesLogixEntityKeyGenerator. You can get access to this service using the following code;

SalesLogixEntityKeyGenerator generator = 
ApplicationContext.Current.Services.Get<SalesLogixEntityKeyGenerator>(false);

Once you have access to the generator it its very easy to get a set of keys;

List<string> keys = new List<string>(generator.GenerateIds(typeof(IHistory), 1));

There you have it.

When working with Sage mobile from time to time you will find that there is missing functionality that you expected to be there but is not. One such piece of functionality involve pick lists and recently worked on a project that required ‘must exist in list’ functionality. By the way did I say how much I like using Eclipse when I have to do java development. Well I do.

Must Exist In List

MustExistInList is a property of Sage Saleslogix web and Lan client picklist. This ensures that the end user cannot enter any free form text into the pick list edit area. This property however has yet to make it up to the mobile implementation. Since the property does not exist and it is not possible to introduce new controls into the form building process I had to take a more intermediate step. The first thing to remember is that most of the controls that exist on the BlackBerry device start as a HorizontalFieldManager.

Generally the following layout for each control is followed

< Label Field > + < Seperator Field > +  < Edit Field >

however with the lookups and picklists the following layout is followed

<Label Field> + < CMPImage > + < Seperator > + < Edit Field >

Now I was not completely sure on the layout of the control, so to help me on a way I wrote a simple helper method that did nothing more then to iterate through the embedded fields on the HorizontalLayoutManager and inform me of the embedded class names.

Once I had this information in hand I built out a pick list adapter method. I should have created a full adapter to allow for future expansion however sometimes KISS should be honored especially if under the gun to deliver in short order.

Its a simple method but effective in providing the functionality.

public static void setPicklistEditable(CMPPickList field, boolean editable ) {
    HorizontalFieldManager manager =  (HorizontalFieldManager) field;
    EditField edit = (EditField)manager.getField(3);
    if (edit != null) {
        edit.setEditable(editable);
    }
}

Note that the index for the field is 3 even though there is 4 embedded controls as arrays in java are 0 based .