We sometimes have odd-ball customer requirements where a package needs a label that includes… who knows. Whatever the customer demands…
Example: Customer PO states that all boxes must be marked “My Dog Has Fleas”
I’ve been asked if we can create a simple dashboard, where the user can enter 4 or 5 lines of text (manual entry… not mapped to any specific table/column), and then send it to a label printer.
My thought was just to create a simple dashboard, or Print menu that includes text fields, perhaps some options for large font and/or bold… and then that gets pushed out to an SSRS report. Mock-up below:
I’m thinking I can potentially bind these controls to CallContextBPMData columns to store values and send them to the report server (if that works, I know it was busted for the Browser awhile back).
But I’m not sure what is required to get this off the ground. Do I need to create an empty BAQ report, maybe just query the Company table or something, so I can basically have a more-or-less empty dataset? Again, I’m not sending any db data… just the values they manually type into the form.
I’m not sure, but I feel like storing this info in a UD field would make this a heck of a lot easier. Whats the downside to having a field in the db to store this?
Nothing… just that it is temporary one-off stupid stuff. Doesn’t NEED to be saved anywhere.
But yeah, I could add some UD columns to, I don’t know… the ShipHead table I suppose and then push those out to a ShipLabl report style.
Again, just trying to spit-ball ideas.
I guess, I just didn’t want to tie it down to a specific application. For example, if my shipping guy just wants to print a random label, I didn’t want to require he creates a Customer Shipment Pack, you know?
Why not a UD table then? Could always make a function that’d delete the table data after x number of days or something too if you didn’t want to keep the data.
I like having a web form that’s embedded in Kinetic. The form is posted, and the service creates a file and drops it in your Bartender folder or calls the BT API directly.
Yeah… going down that path for now to give them something to use. If this becomes more important (like they need to save the label information), I’ll probably go the UD column route.
I tested this quick with a BAQ report adding an option field linked to nothing. Seemed to work? You could do all your formatting and stuff based on inputs.
Okay, shipping was more than happy with a simple Word document… so… request resolved, doesn’t need to be IN Epicor.
However, @jsmuland, since this was my original thought… did you need to actually create a BAQ so there was something to send to the report server? Or did you just create a BAQ report and only include the option fields?
