Over the years, VEITS Group has helped many companies using SyteLine to add buttons to forms to launch custom reports. To do this, you need to create two form variables – one for the background task name that will run the report, and one for the parameters you will pass to the report. One trend we’ve noticed is that if the form did not previously launch a report – customers tend to follow the standard followed by Infor and they create new form variables named ‘BGTaskName’ and ‘BGTaskParms’. Just as Infor does – the value of the variables are then specific to the report you are running, but the variable names are generic.
The problem with this is that if Infor ever adds a report to this form as part of an upgrade – you are most likely going to have a conflict that FormSync will not be able to resolve. Here’s what will happen – when FormSync compares the changes made to the custom form to the changes made to the Infor new version of the form it will find two new variables that have the same name, but different values. FormSync will force you to choose between Infor’s variable or your variable. Either way – you’ll be left with a report button that simply won’t work as designed.
Here’s what we recommend to get around this – prefix your BGTaskName and BGTaskParm variables with your customer prefix that you use for your other custom objects. Instead of ‘BGTaskName’, use ‘ABC_BGTaskName’ and instead of ‘BGTaskParm’ use ‘ABC_BGTaskParm’. These will be obvious to anyone who has done these types of customizations in SyteLine, so you won’t have lost the advantages of following the convention, but you will avoid the conflict if you and Infor use the same variable name during upgrade.
But really, what are the odds, you might ask? Well, if you have seen demonstrations of SL8 ( SyteLine 8 ) – Infor has added report buttons to most of the maintenance forms. If you also have custom report buttons on these forms, the chances are high that there will be a conflict during upgrade. With this simple tweak of the naming convention, you can easily avoid this conflict.
