Customizing Apparel – Lessons Learned
Customizing Apparel – Lessons Learned
Recently in Nextper for one of our US customers, we had the requirement to enhance the apparel functionality, it was a tricky one and we faced a few challenges that we want to share.
One limitation we find in the Apparel (41F) module is that the heart of apparel, the matrix used to display items does not allow filtering by most of the fields available on the grid. It also does not allow us to load quantities in units of measurement other than primary.
All this is possible, you can easily make the fields of the grid support QBE, the names of the columns corresponding to the attributes can become variables and more important, you can enter quantities in any unit of measurement, even different units of measurement for each item.
The only way to have QBE available in a grid is to have the fields available from a table view. The matrix shows a view over the FCW20 table, this table works as a work table. When any application calls to the matrix, upload the table FCW20, this process can be modified to complete another table too. On this new table, you could add any field, including the new descriptions for the QBE and another if required. The next step is to clone the PCW10 and changes the view for a join between the FCW20 and the new tag table.
The new column names of the new attributes could be variable, retrieving them from a user defined UDC. You could associate a UDC for each apparel item structure, so you will have different column headers for each Item structure. You could add new processing options to the cloned application to relate the Apparel Item structures with an UDC that contains the values to use on the header columns.
To use a different unit of measure, the trick is to include a new column with the desired unit of measure and when returning to the caller screen, do so in primary unit of measure.
To return the quantities on primary unit of measure, you need to convert the quantities before the application updates the cache using the entered Unit of measure to primary.
The most import thinks is that all changes will be available for any application that calls the matrix.
To do all this changes were necessary to make changes in some objects and others were created:
We decide to clone the matrix entry application PCW10. This application use the view VCW20 (Matrix Work File -All Columns). This view was modified, now is a join between the original table FCW20 and other new table with the same key as FCW20 but with all the fields that we require.
The function N4210430 – Sales Order View Dispatcher (Invoke Apparel Matrix Entry) has hardcode the name of the matrix application (PCW10). Remember that we decide to clone it so; this function should be change to calls the new one.
The new table records with the required new fields for the application is created at the same moment that the standard table FCW20 is created, to accomplish this the function BCW30 Matrix With Level 0, was modified to do it.
The function BCW06 - Retrieve Item Level Description retrieves information to include on the FCW20 table. This function was cloned and modified to retrieve the new information that we needs in the new apparel application.
To keep database integrity we needed to change the BSFN that deletes the FCW020 to also delete the new tag table.
Few objects needed to be changed in order to include the desired behavior achieving a great enhancement in the apparel functionality.
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