OK Think Tank. I am being asked to hide references to cost across the application for certain users. Basically, anyone who doesn’t need to know the cost.
I started out thinking, I could just update Field Level Security for any cost fields to None. But I quickly found out that wouldn’t work on its own. That doesn’t hide any cost related fields that are calculated in the UI.
Then I thought I could just figure out what forms have cost data and customize them. But as I get into customizing one, I realized there are a bunch of dashboards and reports that have cost data. So then I’m looking at updating BAQs and dashboards… of course, if they aren’t already custom, I will have to save copies of them and overwrite all the menu paths to the custom versions… I haven’t even wrapped my head around how I will fix the reports but I assume I’ll have to make custom report styles and strip out costs… but only for certain users. So I’m going to have to get Security Groups into all those places in order to calculate which user should have ability to see costs.
So, having got you up to speed with my thought process, I’m curious if anyone else out there has had to do this? What did you do? How would you approach the problem? Is there a better way?
Two words…good luck. It’s difficult regardless of what platform you’re on - and I’m on my fifth ERP package here (one of which got scrapped before go-live but I’ll count it anyway). It always required customized whatevers - trackers/inquiries, reports - if you couldn’t lock someone out completely. Hate to ruin your Friday even more but if you’re hiding cost you’ll have to hide stuff like Gross Margin and Gross Profit and all that kinda stuff.
Quick and dirty on a tracker or a report might be to set the displayed/printed cost as zero if a specific attribute is (or is not) found on the user…maybe a UD table for “unapproved” users?
I know masking has had some issues with updating text fields with the masking characters at one time. Not sure if that was fixed but masking would do exactly what you want. It’s a part of Field Security.
This was a huge ask of ours when we came to Epicor. Our implementation consultant said it couldn’t be done… we had an outside consultant say that it could, and that they had done it… so we tried, but the solution just never really worked.
We wanted to use actual labor rates in our cost calculations, but begrudgingly went to using blended rates by department.
How is field security applied to the fields that are not bound to the database? For example, in Part Tracker, there are 5 bound fields for each type of cost… but the total is a calculation and only shows up there in the form. I was hopeful some control could be applied on Extended Properties which seems to contain those extra values that the dataView has. But didn’t see anything like that there.
That’s an excellent question. I had not thought about masking at the data view level. You’d want it masked when the data is returned, otherwise it would be trivial to view in the browser.
I have been thinking the same thing. We were just recently acquired and our new ownership is slowly pushing us along toward how they do things. So I’m a little unclear as to the reasoning yet. I just know that we’re being asked to set our stuff up to align with the way they have their stuff set up.
I’m looking forward to understanding the underlying reasoning so that I can better approach this problem. I am quantifying the complexity so I can try to convey just how big an ask it is at our next staff meeting. I ran a BAQ to see how many columns exist in BAQs that have the word Cost in them… 961 so far. So that’s fun. But that’s honestly the easy part. I can more easily control a BAQ based on security. It’s the system reports and all the places in the different forms where it’s referenced. There’s just going to be a ton of work if we end up having to do it. Unless someone in here has already done it and wants to sell it
This is an old thread but why not just go into Application Studio, create a layer without Costs. So 2 Part Trackers, one with and one without. Of course then you have regular Part screen…and so on and so forth. Also have the same request so thinking that might be the only clear cut way to remove Costs from the screen.
Just tested and it does not work to delete costs from the layer. That would be such an easy fix to this as we have the same issue. We ran Epicor Enterprise which was very old but allowed us to lock down users from seeing costs.
