Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Link your Dynamics GP entity to anything ... sounds cool huh?

One cool "extra" that comes with the Dynamics GP Adapter for U-LINC is the ability to link an entity (vendor, customer, employee, sales transaction, etc.) to a URL.  Then navigate to that URL from a Dynamics GP Window.


Note the "i" icon on the top right of the window?  In this case, click on the link opens a SharePoint document library containing all the PO's for the selected vendor.

Conceptually, you could link to anything ... from document libraries, to portal sites, to pdf and Word documents.  If you can build a hyperlink to it, you can create a connection between a Dynamics GP record and that object.

The obvious next question is, "So how do I identify the specific URL for the selected record?"  It's actually quite easy, open the target SharePoint list for the integration to the table that contains the record, and find the associated list item.  Open the item and set the "More Information URL" to the desired value.


Once you save this change, the icon will appear for that record in Dynamics GP.

While this approach may be labor intensive, you can automate the population of this field from a SharePoint workflow.  Simply create a workflow that sets the field value when an item is added to the list.


The key in this scenario, is that the URL is consistent for all vendors, save the Vendor ID.  We get that from the current list item and use it in the URL as a variable.

With this feature, U-LINC can now "LINC" Dynamics GP to SharePoint to provide a rich end user experience ... hope you enjoy this feature!

(Note: this feature is near and dear to me ... I coded this on a weekend after a meeting with a partner who thought that's what U-LINC did before we showed him what it actually does ... :-)  Hope you like it as much as I do!)

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