Once again, today I discovered that I didn't know something that I should have. I'm sure I could come up with a good excuse, but you would think I would have at least stumbled across it before now. Maybe I knew about it 10 years ago but forgot.
While eating a very tasty panang curry at lunch today, I was reading the ENTIRE eConnect Programmer's Guide PDF, trying to figure out how to eliminate the need for MSMQ from a customer's ancient eConnect integration. That's a completely different story, but while reading that eConnect PDF, I learned something.
One of the common questions about eConnect is "How do I generate document numbers?" And the developer then has to learn one of the techniques to generate document numbers. Once you have the code it isn't too bad, but with slightly different code for different document types, it's a bit of a hassle.
And so today, with my tongue on fire from my curry, I read this in the eConnect guide, and stared in disbelief:
When I asked if he knew about this feature, Mr. Tim Wappat just shook his head in dismay, so disappointed with us American developers.
I just tested this and sure enough, it does work.
Will I use it? Maybe. But I regularly have integrations where I need to update a source data field with the GP document number after it is successfully imported. In those cases, if I generate the document number first, I can assign it to the transaction, and then use it to update the source data--no need to parse the resulting eConnect doc to extract the number.
But in cases where you don't need to assign a document number and don't care what number was assigned to a transaction, sure, it's a convenient option.
Keep learning.
Steve Endow is a Microsoft MVP for Dynamics GP and a Dynamics
GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles. He is the owner of Precipio
Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and
automation solutions.
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