In XX century especially in the era of supercomputers accounting application was something running it its own computing case and open to users via monitors, keyboards and printers. Then we see the appearance of such concepts as EDI, Barcoding, RFID and plus accounting application was renamed into ERP with Sales, Purchasing, Inventory Control, Manufacturing and Human Resource functionalities.
Now think about such sales channel as ecommerce portal where shopping cart and credit card payment are transferred automatically into your accounting system. And another observation is about diversity in the way of doing business and business processes uniqueness as the advantage in the competition. All these are reasons for ERP software to become more and more flexible and ready for custom logic, tables and workflows. Twenty years ago in order to customize ERP system programmers had to obtain source code and do software development there and of course each new version was slashing the customization and it needed to be reapplied. In 1990th in such applications as Great Plains Dynamics the concept of dictionaries and customization distribution in the form of so-called chunk file improved the flexibility. SAP Business One goes even further with having business logic stored in the metadata which in turn sits in SQL database. Let’s review how work could be done in SAP B1:
1. User Defined Tables and Fields. Traditionally in accounting applications developers provided so-called ‘user defined fields’ already incorporated in the table structure. Let’s imagine that for the customer record you need something unique to your business requirements for example the field Hobbies. Not a problem and you just take user defined field one and assign it for hobbies record. However if you have control over metadata and it is hosted in SQL Server company database then why don’t we just add field to existing table hosting business partner records? Let’s hold on for a moment and compare this new architecture with the options available fifteen years ago. In Great Plains Dynamics metadata was stored in dictionary files and they were the engine for Dexterity to play the business logic. Dynamics.dic file stores core business logic even in modern Microsoft Dynamics GP. But it is operating system file and it is not something stored in SQL. In order to add new field in Dynamics GP you have to learn Dexterity IDE and add fields to new table linked to existing table in one-to-one relation via primary key. And now to Business One and the question are newly created fields are available immediately for Software Development Kit programming? The answer is they really are. User defined objects are often key elements in integration and reporting
2. Software Development Kit. This is where you do custom programming. Microsoft Visual Studio is recommended as code snippets available in VB.Net and C#. When you are coding integration consider several time related options. First one is simple DOS application that could be scheduled on Windows Server to run every night or maybe every half an hours. This scenario is often referred as quasi real time. In certain situations you need real time data transfer and that could be accomplished via SOAP XML Web Service project with SDK libraries. By the way web service could be called from non-Windows computer platform or in other words from Linux hosting PHP code and MySQL database. Linux is very popular in Ecommerce hosting
3. Providing Second Opinion. If you are reading this document then probably your software development project was screwed by somebody else. Feel free to appeal to second opinion as you got to have your business running
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