Hello,
Quick question that my boss asked.
Can you increase the field length of WhseBin.BinNum from 10 to 30?
I am of the opinion that you can’t but I wanted to make sure before I tell him no.
If you can, please let me know the proper way and I will let him know.
Thanks!
You need to tel your boss that the BinNum is a code, and that any more descriptive text should be in the WhseBin.Description field.
Or do you have 37^30 bins? (that’s more than a 1 followed by 47 zeros)
Sorry,
Didn’t think to give more detail.
We are adding a company to Epicor whose entire warehouse is coded to barcode numbers that are longer than 10 characters. He was asking to increase it to some number that is greater than the length of their barcode which he didn’t know. I came up with 30 for this question just as an example to increase to.
If it can’t be done, then they will need to reformat their stock numbering system to work with what we can do. Does that make sense?
As far as I know changing the length of a standard field like BinNum will not work.
I saw a case similar to yours where the site ended up using a UD field and then adding custom logic/associations with the shorter, BinNums as needed.
Worked but looking back now, I wonder if bitiing the bullet and just redoing the numbering might have been the better solution.
Do the codes of the new warehouse share a common prefix or anything? I’m thinking their previous system wasn’t setup to use different warehouses, so the first couplke of characters were used to ID the warehouse and the remainder as the Bin.
If that’s the case, then drop off their prefix and just use that prefix as the Warehouse ID. Then any report could combine the two to get the orginal code.
If you’re on-prem with access to the database, there might be a very hacky off-label way. As an experiment, I once modified the width of a database column in the actual DB schema. I think it was the output path for EDI files, which is unreasonably short, like 20 chars. I found that the Epicor UI still restricted input to the original width. A co-worker had the idea of running regen like you would after adding a UD column. But I don’t know if she ever tried that, or what the result was.
If this works, you’d need to change the width of BinNum in every table it appears in. You can find those columns by querying sys.tables and sys.columns.
On the lines of changing a built-in fields width, I had to change the “width” of the NextSales Order number field, as we used 7 digits with the first 3 indicating the year (and set the number each January to yyy0001. The user interface limited it to 6, so we couldn’t enter it in natively. So we changed the Ext Properties.
I think this only worked because we didn’t actually mess with the storage of data (it is an integer), but rather increased the number of digits displayed in the UI. This wouldn’t work as a customization to the form, as that still respected the field’s width as “6”