Potato IT

Most of my posts have been around how to do things. Typically they are small scripts. Today I’ll discuss one of the projects I have been working on to demonstrate that scripting isn’t just for the quick and easy tasks but can also solve complex issues.

IFL need to get imported product and caught product in to M3, they also have a 3^rd Party Logistics Coolstore operation which they also want to keep track of within M3.

The process that has been designed is using Purchase Orders to get stock in to M3. 3^rd Party stock goes in at zero cost, imported and caught products have prices against them to reflect the costs.

IFL uses lot control extensively which determines what product can be exported to which parts of the world, each import, each landing will have multiple products in a single lot – so we need to create lots for each product and populate some of the attributes.

And finally we have to receipt the product.

In standard M3 we do something like this:

1. Create the PO Header (PPS200)
2. Create the PO Lines for each item
   1. PPS201/B1
   2. PPS201/E
3. Create lot numbers for each item (MMS235/B1)
4. Populate some of the lot details (MMS235/E)
5. Receipt the Purchase Order
   1. PPS300/A
   2. PPS300/B1
   3. PPS300/E
6. Set the lot attribute values (MMS235/B1)
7. ATS101/B

Continue reading →

During the course of removing the modifications from IFL I wanted a way to run some of the C# developments directly so I thought I’d do some investigation.

Using the MenuExtensionService we can add new entries to the Navigator menu, the key being that we need to force a refresh and then we need a way to do this when Smart Office itself launches.

I created a little script which will read an xml file which contains the name to appear in the menu and the URI I want to launch and add these to the M3 Navigator. This script can be run on Smart Offices startup.

For the launching of Smart Office and running a script I referred to Karins post here:
http://smartofficeblog.com/2014/01/21/controlling-the-users-canvas-with-stand-alone-jscripts/

Which for me became:

http://ifsonp.indfish.co.nz:22107/mango/MangoClient.application?server=https://IFSONP.indfish.co.nz:22108&task=mforms%3a%2f%2f_runscript%3fname%3dtestLoadMenu.js

http://ifsonp.indfish.co.nz:22107 and https://IFSONP.indfish.co.nz:22108 is IFLs Smart Office server, these should be substituted with your own. testLoadMenu.js is the name of my Jscript.

Note: when you run a script in the command line the controller object won’t be initialised, so you need to comment out the code line the Jscript editor adds by default:

var content : Object = controller.RenderEngine.Content;

Anyway, the script is pretty simple, and not too hard to follow so…

/*
**	Load Menu
**
**	This script will read an xml file and create menus in the navigator
*/
import System;
import System.Windows;
import System.Windows.Controls;
import MForms;

import System.Xml;
import System.Xml.XPath;
import System.Xml.Serialization;

import System.IO;

import Mango.UI.Core;
import Mango.UI.Services;

package MForms.JScript
{
	class testLoadMenu
	{
		// path to the menus
		var xmlfile = "D:\\Development\\JScript\\Menus.xml";
		
		public function Init(element: Object, args: Object, controller : Object, debug : Object)
		{
			try
			{
				// var content : Object = controller.RenderEngine.Content;
				
				// I am reading a file off the filesystem, in a production environment you wouldn't
				// do this, you'd have the URI in the initialisation of the XPathDocument
				var stream = new StreamReader(xmlfile);
				
				var doc  : XPathDocument = new XPathDocument(stream);
				var nav  : XPathNavigator = doc.CreateNavigator();

				// get a list of MenuItems 
				var menuItems = nav.Select("//MenuItem");
				
				if(null != menuItems)
				{
					// loop through our list of menu items
					for(var currentItem in menuItems)
					{
						// extract the Menu Name
						var menuName = currentItem.Evaluate("string(Name)");
						// extract the URI
						var menuURI = currentItem.Evaluate("string(URI)");

						// add to the navigator
						MenuExtensionService.Current.AddNode(new Task(new Uri(menuURI.ToString()), menuName.ToString()));
					}

				}
				stream.Close();
				
				// this will cause the navigator to refresh
				TasksService.Invalidate();
			}
			catch(ex)
			{
				debug.Error(ex);
			}
		}
	}
}

And an example XML file
 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Menu>
	<MenuItem>
		<Name>JScript</Name>
		<URI>mforms://jscript</URI>
	</MenuItem>
	<MenuItem>
		<Name>Clear Cache</Name>
		<URI>mforms://jscript/clearcache</URI>
	</MenuItem>
</Menu>

This question has cropped up before and I thought that for convenience, I’d add a post as an anchor point.

In the Smart Office blog from our friendly Smart Office developers in Sweden, we have a post which answers the question that many of us had been asking for a long time. How to add a column to a ListView in Smart Office. As most of you know there are a number of traps and oddities around the ListView which make what you would expect to be a fairly simple task horribly complex.

http://smartofficeblog.com/2012/02/13/adding-a-new-column-in-a-m3-list/

(which is based off a great post by Thibaud here https://thibaudatwork.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/how-to-add-a-column-to-a-list/)

The one problem with this script is that it will break when you have an Editable cell in your ListView, and this is due to these two lines of code:

               var newItems = new String[columnCount];

               row.Items.CopyTo(newItems,0);

Specifically the creating the array as an array of strings rather than objects. The ListRow object that is bound to the ItemsSource has an array of objects – currently these can be either String objects OR Mango.UI.Services.Lists.EditableCell objects.

I used the Visual Studio debugger so I could see the objects below (I am preparing a more detailed article on how this works – it is pretty kewl what happens!)

See the Items property above – we have an array of object[19] – one object for each column. The highlighted line above shows that the 4^th item in the array is not a String. So instantly an exception will get thrown when we try to copy the EditableCell in to a String.

Correcting this is remarkably simple, we change line 43 in the linked article to read like this:

var newItems = new Object[columnCount];

The CopyTo will no longer throw an exception.

Happy coding!

Cheers,

Scott