Non-intrusive Customization of Enterprise Financials

• The system lets you apply changes to the standard layout/design. The system stores the applied changes (changed properties) at user/role/system level.

• The UI design changes are at the activity level. Even if the standard application used the same object form for all activities, the end user can change the form layout for each of the activities.

UI Design mode is typically used to:

Design Mode can be disabled in the System Settings option. If the customer does not intend to do any UI Customization, you can disable the function for performance reasons.

The UI Design Mode is the main way to change the applications UI. Typically, Customization developers would remove fields, or make them read-only. They can also totally rearrange the form.

You can also use UI Customization to put new fields on the form and put new tab controls and grids on the form (this is in case of adding a custom table to an existing form).

The UI Design Mode is available on almost all forms in the fin application. Start it using “Tools->Design Mode…”

• (1) You can use the Properties panel to manually change available properties of the selected control (the control that is selected with a red rectangle on the screen). The name of the business field represented on the object form is displayed in the Field List, Properties window (as the FieldName property). In most cases, this value is auto-completed. If the field is not directly mapped to a field in the object dataset, the field name is not displayed, and the related business field name is retrieved using other mechanisms or by consulting the HTML documentation.

• (2) The Field/Control panel contains the business fields and/or controls that are available, but not visible on the form. The user can drag the fields from the panel straight on the form in Design Mode.

• (2) If the user wants to add a custom table on the form, the user can drag it to the form, which adds a grid to the form.

• (3) On the form design, the user can use the context menu to add a tabcontrol (max. 1 per form), and in an existing tabcontrol add tabpages. One can also add a text control this way.

• (4) The “Copy settings” button gives the user the ability to copy an existing UI Customization (from some other user/role) for personal use. When this option is used, the selected Customization over-writes the previous Customization.

Many of the UI Customization activities include the use of user-defined fields. Because the data available on the BL backend and the UI front end are different, and the datasets are the only way the data is passed between the layers, we try to use UDFs in many cases just to pass data.

Every component’s object dataset can contain business fields used to store customer specific values (user-defined fields). They can be defined on one or more data tables in the object dataset. The user-defined fields are fields that map to physical fields in the database. The fields are known in the internal data flow within the application, but also in the application database itself. For the internal use of these user-defined fields, all normal patterns are followed. User-defined fields are passed between database, application server, and client in the same way as other object data.

Use this activity to define a user-defined field. A user-defined field means, in effect, that the end user gives the field a meaning.

Specify the following information:

• Business Component: This is the label of the business component. For example “GL account” maps to the physical component name “BGl”. Use the activity Business Component View to detect this mapping.

• Field Name: Select a type of physical field. Typically, the following types of custom fields are available: CustomShort0..9 (character type fields, for normal fields with a limited display length); CustomLong0..1 (character type fields, with a longer display length); CustomCombo0..9 (character type fields, with a possible values list attached); CustomDecimal0..4 (decimal type fields); CustomInteger0..4 (Integer type fields); CustomDate0..4 (date type fields); CustomNote (character type field especially for fields represented as an editor)

• The Value List tab is only enabled for user-defined fields of type “CustomCombo”. This tab lets the user specify a distinct list of possible values.