Why Acumatica ERP PX.DataSource give rendering error at design view? - acumatica

I started using Acumatica ERP framework to create a sample application. I follow the steps provided in training document. By following the steps i added a ListView maintenance page.
The newly created page has PX.DataSource control created by acumatica framework. But this control has one error message with it i.e. "Error Rending Control - usrCaption". I attached the screenshot of this error.
I reinstalled framework many time but still same issue occurred to me. I opened my project on other machines and it's working fine. and also projects created on other machines that are working fine on source machine also giving same error on my machine.

Why Acumatica ERP PX.DataSource give rendering error at design view?
Usually this occurs because the template are lagging behind in terms of maintenance and aren't 100% compatible with all possible Visual Studio deployment (especially the latest versions).
The templates are very rarely used and since the Customization Project Editor has all the same features and more this is the one most users are using and the focus is put on maintaining this one before the Visual Studio templates.
It's unfortunate that the T100 training documents focus on these. Support regarding the templates is always originating from T100 training since they aren't very useful besides that. I would prefer the training direct new user to the Customization Project Editor instead because as far as I know it is what everybody uses and the only one that is always up to date.

Related

Create Form Template from existing ones

Is there any way that I can create a template within forms to utilize for every user in the company?
For instance; let's say I have the Sales Order Screen (SO301000) and the Document Detail grid configured in certain way, that display different amount of columns than the default (either more or less columns).
For each user I want to use this template (and all the ones created) that I will apply when I add the new user.
I'l appreciate any guidance and help.
EDIT:
I provided answer for Form element ASP template below. Although reading your question again I think what you're trying to do would be more along the lines of automating grid column configuration. We call this feature Default Table Layout.
There's a feature request for it here:
https://feedback.acumatica.com/ideas/ACU-I-415
The feature has been shipped in version 2017R2 and is documented here:
https://help.acumatica.com/(W(1))/Main?ScreenId=ShowWiki&pageid=30f3229f-20f1-4055-9c03-e0fe3b37080d
Image copy of documentation page:
For ASP Form templates
There are two ways to work with customizations in Acumatica:
As a Customization Project, everything is done directly in Acumatica
instance through the web browser using the Customization Project Editor.
As an extension library (DLL file) compiled in Visual Studio which is then included in the FILES section of a Customization Project.
For method 1, I believe creating custom templates would be a bit of a hack and would not be officially supported, if someone knows otherwise please chime in.
For method 2, we ship the Visual Studio templates with the Acumatica Configuration Wizard (Acumatica ERP Installer).
Those templates are in the following folder:
My Documents\Visual Studio 20XX\Templates\ItemTemplates\Visual C#
The templates will be available for ASP.NET solution only. You can open Acumatica Instance Website as a solution if the website is already deployed:
When you open Add New Item dialog:
The Acumatica Templates will be available:
Those are standard Visual Studio templates so you can copy and re-use them to create your own. Microsoft documentation for creating user template applies and you can follow their guidelines. Note that working with Visual Studio and creating your own template is somewhat less user friendly than using Acumatica Customization Project Editor.
Acumatica T100 covers using Visual Studio to create customizations and would be a good starting point to learn the techniques involved:
https://openuni.acumatica.com/courses/development/t100-introduction-to-acumatica-framework/

Missing custom screen in Acumatica customization project

I’m experiencing an issue with customization projects in Acumatica 2017 R2 Build 17.203.0029.
Specifically, custom screens, while in my project XML, are not visible within the customization project browser nor can they be navigated to once published (which occurs without error). This only occurs on my staging server. Everything works fine in my local dev environment and even on a different instance of Acumatica. My local dev environment matches the staging server in every possible way (Acumatica version, other packages, etc.)
Older versions of the same customization project have been published before and did not exhibit this behavior. It’s only after I replaced the project with newer version of the same project that I encounter the missing custom screen issue.
As shown in the screenshot below, remnants of the custom screens are present in the Customized Screens window. And the ASPX files are present and shown in the Custom Files window.
Screenshot of missing custom screen data
When I compare the “Edit Project Items” objects between the staging the server and my local dev version, they appear the same.
It it possible that the internal customization or sitemap tables on the staging server have inconsistent data? Is there anyway to rebuild them?
The solution appears related to the users roles config. I had not assigned access rights to the custom forms. Doing so solved the issue. The custom screens are now accessible by direct URL and are shown in the customization project browser. Maybe this will help someone else.
I had this same issue when trying to Deploy the customization to another instance.
To fix it I had to go to the site manager and change the URL of the new page
from: "/Pages/SO/CustomName"
to: "~/Pages/SO/CustomName"

Domino Designer not syncing properly

In a rather complex project the entire project team is encountering more and more problems regarding designer, like frequent crashes, exceeding of memory limits and- most annoying - problems with outdated project data:
quite often we observe that two different designer clients are showing different versions of project data (see below for a rough description of the environment).
A simple example: an hour ago a co-worker asked me to open and test a new Xpage she had created 15 minutes ago in her Designer. In my Designer client however the new Xpage was not present yet. right-clicking my application and hitting "refresh" brought up the new Xpage.
The problem hits the ceiling with design elements that we both are working on in turns (as in "are you currently working on xpage XXX? I'd like to add..."). So with this syncing delay the problem is obvious: If I foirget to manually sync my project before adding stuff I will overwrite the co-workers' codings.
We never had this problem before, although I have to admit that we never had to work in a team on such a massive project.
Here's the setup:
all designer clients are 9.0.1 FP6
everyone is working on the same project stored on the same server
everyone is working on the same network withion the same building, just door-to-door
Is there something we could do or check to improve this situation?
Lothar, you have stated three problems at once. I'll try dissect them.
Frequent crashes:
We experienced many, many crashes in our daily work after upgrading to Windows 10. I know it sounds silly, but one way it worked for us and successfully mitigated those crashes was installing IBM Designer into C:\IBM\Notes, instead of C:\Program Files\IBM\Notes.
Granting 'Full Access' to 'All Users' over that folder was also necessary.
Exceeding of memory limits: As jtomas correctly pointed out, default memory settings are not enough for heavy xpages development in Domino Designer. I would suggest going to vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m.
Problems with outdated project data: I think there is no workaround for this problem because there is no problem. Domino Designer 9 is a Eclipse based software, and works like so.
Think about it: When working in Java projects, developers download (checkout) source files from a Source Control System (SVN, Git, etc) and work them locally. Whenever a developer modifies or create a file, another developer can see it only if:
a) The modified/new file has been uploaded (commit) to Source Control Repository; and
b) Other developers have synchronized (refresh) their local projects with the repository.
See, that's how Java development works and that's the way we should do it too. Upon opening a NSF file, Domino Designer breaks it down into many files, just like a Java project. Once locally saved into the Java Virtual File System, those files get updates only when you refresh the project. Silly, but it is what it is.
My recipe to a well succeeded Domino development team include:
1) Design locking: All developers must explicitly lock elements they will work on. We don't rely on implicit locks.
2) Communications: All members of the team must be immediately notified whenever a developer has made major updates to the project.
3) Source Control: Despite its pitfalls, we rely heavily on SVN as code repository. It's far from perfect, and merges don't work properly, but it's better than no control.
Hope it helps.
I'm not sure this will fix your syncing issue but I have found modifying the following 3 lines in your local Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\jvm.properties file to help with Designer performance when developing in XPages especially with large projects:
vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx512m
vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m
vmarg.Xmca=-Xmca512k
These are the memory limits I use. You can increase the limits just make sure they are a multiple of 4. You have to restart Notes & Designer for changes to take effect.

Using SSRS instead of Crystal reports to generate admin forms

I'm looking into upgrading a .net 2.0 app. The app is used by the public authorities of a certain city to keep track of expenses and generate reports and forms.
The reports and forms were generated in VS2005 using Crystal report. They follow a well defined layout, like official documents usually do.
I am looking at options to upgrade the application and the main problem I have is in determining how to deal with the crystal report files.
I have successfully upgraded to VS2008, but any version after that doesn't have CR anymore, so my company would have to pruchase CR separately and because the client and my company are both tight, I'm looking at alternatives...
The obvious one is using SSRS. I have never touched it before in my life, but after playing around with it for a bit, I get the impression that it is not very well suited to generating forms with lots of non-tabular content and lots of formatting. Or am I wrong?
It seems that every line has to be drawn separately. There is no (that I can see) accurate way of positioning lines for formatting...
But I'm just a beginner, so I might be getting this all wrong?
If that is the case, are there any other alternatives to CR and SSRS?
I was thinking of maybe having a separate MVC web site project in the solution. Have that generate the layout in html and css with data from my entity model, then view the result in a (built-in or not) web browser. Am I overcomplicating on this?
I really need advice from somebody who's done that kind of thing before.
What SSRS is good for:
Talking to SQL Server, much faster than other products as it in many cases retains the database better when in other programs IMHO they repeat query at times.
Designing collapsable grids and chart objects from datasets. You can have 'groups' that can nest aggregates of collapsed values and can be un collapsed or collapsed on demand based on expressions, parameters, or a recusive parent set.
A web service for deployment ease where you can deploy one or many objects. You can also write add ons for this service with C# and the ReportingService.asmx web service.
You can talk to the web service directly in a 'form' object in HTML and manipulate it's output.
You can schedule reports to send out via email and file saves automatically to clients or internal users.
What SSRS IS NOT GOOD FOR:
It is not event driven hardly at all except for parameters. You cannot click on many things and get other parts on the form itself to update. You may do an 'action' that goes to another location, report, or site. But in essence you are calling a seperate object, not the same instance again.
Multiple layers of reporting. Beyond tweaking tool tips you cannot do 'hover over' reporting without hacking SSRS. You can make javascript windows show other reports but it is not baked in to SSRS. So you are either clicking into new reports or tab stops in a report but not getting hover over quick objects beyond text and expressions that are in tool tips.
What do you want before considering what you need to impement?
I want to input and export things while talking to my database - ASP.NET with potentially HTML 5 or MVC4 if you want to be very new. ASP.NET is made for actively talking to a server and taking commands IN as well as OUT.
I want a form to auto update periodically on a page as a landing site and dashboard - AJAX and Javascript on top of HTML, Java or ASP.NET.
I want to create reports that exist on a Server and can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms in .NET via web service calls - SSRS.
SSRS's biggest selling point to me is it's reusability once you dial a report in. They are pretty easy to create, easy to configure, easy to deploy, and if you get a little advanced in calling the webservice you can get SSRS report objects in other technologies if you want.
There is Crystal reports for VS2010 and VS2012. It is just not shipped with them. You can download the installation from here: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824
I am running through the same decision process at this time. There is a .NET product from a company called "Windward" that will allow you to design your reports in Microsoft Office. If you are in the MS ecosystem already or want your users to design reports instead of always calling on you, this might help.
Their template design tool is called AutoTag and you can deploy these template to their .NET based engine in a few lines of code.
I know the question is regarding SSRS vs. Crystal comparison but thought you should know there are other alternatives and some can make life easier
Ryan

Developing ASP.Net User Control to be imported to SharePoint MOSS 2007

Apologies if this has been answered, but I could not find a similar question:
I am developing a webpart for MOSS 2007. I am using WSPBuilder to built a visual webpart (ascx) and everything works fine, but the development/debug cycle is just painfully slow, so I'd like to know if it is possible (without being too painful) to develop the user control faster using an .Net Web Application project with all of the nice F5 debugging, then import the final product into my SharePoint visual webpart.
The user control interacts with a LOB system (SQL) and does not reference the SharePoint API at all. (The reason I am building this as a webpart is because I don't need another web app to run this one page, so putting it into a webpart on a new webpart page on my existing site is the best solution IMO.) I would obviously need to import (reference?) my data access classes into my "temp" web app, but think that would not be too much trouble.
I realize this will be extra effort to get this set up, but am thinking the payoff will be reduced development time of the actual user control using a little web application vs having to use the compile/build WSP/deploy WSP/reset ISS/test/make a change/repeat cycle that MOSS requires. (I guess SP2010/VS2010 has spoiled me with the native SharePoint tools available.)
Update:
I have successfully built a simple web app with one page and loaded up my UC on the page. (I had to comment out all of the Sharepoint Import and register statements that WSP Builder added to the UC for me when I created the webpart.) I added references to my utility classes (which I left in the obj\Debug folder in the original SharePoint project). It took me a while tinkering with everything to get it to work, but the steps ended up being pretty simple and I think I can replicate the steps quickly for future projects. Once it was set up, I was able to rapidly design the UC and build in the UC functionality using the typical F5 debug cycle. Unless someone can show me why this is not a good idea, I plan to repeat this for future projects! Thanks to everyone for thier input.
.
Update 2
Well, I am not sure what I did but moving the UC back into SharePoint proved to be troublesome. The first time I did it, I spent several hours getting it to work in SharePoint, making me question whether it was worth it. However, I am stubborn and tried it again. This time, I only copied and pasted the markup below the "header section" (the part with all of the <%# . . . %> statements) in the ascx file and everything went perfectly. I think I must have changed something inadvertantly the first time. I think I will continue this pattern as it is so much faster to build and test the UC in an ASP.NET web app. (Again, this only works if you are not referencing the Sharepoint API anywhere in the UC.)
The answer here is the SmartPart. It is perfect for just the scenario you are describing. Very easy to create a Usercontrol using "vanilla" ASP.NET and have it work as a webpart in SharePoint. I've outlined the steps to migrate from ASP.NET webpage to statically bound SmartPart on my blog.
What you intend to achieve is surely a nice idea.
Just remember to strong name your user control, drop it in your Server's GAC, update SafeControls section of your SharePoint 80's web.config.
All these setps are one off, after each successive builds (of your web control), you have to just deploy the control (used forcede deploy) in GAC and reset IIS.
You can add this control to toolbox in VS by selecting 'Choose Items' and selecting ther assembly you just deployed.
In addition you can create a test ASP.NET page to test the functionality of your control.

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