In migrating customizations from E9 to E10 I have come across a case where somebody created a custom field for a screen. In E10 this field has been added as a standard field, and looking back at E9 it appears that this field already existed there too. I suspect what happened is that somebody wanted an additional field, and the person who added it did not realize the field already existed in another place.
What is the best practice for handling such a case? As the field already exists and now has a standard place to enter it on the screen in E10, should I discontinue use of the custom field? If so, how? I think I would need to export this field and then DMT it in to the proper field, and then do this again each time we do a conversion pass until we go live. That doesn’t sound too bad, but there may be other places this custom field is referenced. Is there some foolproof and quick way to find everywhere it might be used so I can replace it with the proper field?
What about if the field was new in Epicor version 10 and did not exist in version 9? Does this change the best practice in this case?
if it did exist in E9, why not just DMT it into E9 so you don’t have to in E10? (I don’t know E9 so if this isn’t possible, disregard)
Another thought, it might be possible that for some reason the business rules around that field were too restrictive, so that’s why someone made the UD field. Anyways, just thoughts as to why someone would create the duplicated field.
Actually in looking at this a bit more, I’m becoming convinced that the field actually was not in E10. (I was looking at the field info from the Customization dialog box instead of the field help.) So at this point I’m thinking that if I don’t migrate to the new field, I’ll miss out on all the features that have been added to support this new field. But, I’m still concerned about missing places to “search and replace” as it were.
What you can do is use the new field in E10 to have the inbuilt functionality associated with it by Epicor and have a BPM to populate your UD field every time the Epicor field is updated. This will give you the functionality you have built around your UD field.
The field is new in E10 under the Supplier Maintenance screen in the “Ship Via” field. The field help lists the database field as Vendor.ShipViaCode.
You need to determine if there is any business logic that is in use by the UD filed, and if any business logic of E10’s built-in field is compatible.
The use of field native to E10, may have requirements (or drive functionality) that you didn’t have in E9.