Honestly is likely a lot of the cases, but Fulfillment Workbench is one place for us that right now we have thousands of records to pull in and process, so scrolling to the bottom waiting for the system to load more results just won’t work. Now, of course, that’s a ton of records and we’re working on some major internal improvements that should greatly reduce that number, but I would still expect us to have more than 200 records to process there.
Also, we have implemented some RPA solutions for updating PO Release dates that I have found the only way to do so without having to unapprove/re-approve POs to make those changes is through the Paste Update feature in an updatable dashboard, so it’s critical for us that a dashboard returns all results when we need it to.
You have more tools available than you know my friend.
At 2021.2, you have functions. UBAQs are Functions Lite. Anything you can do with a UBAQ, you can do with a function. If nobody is looking at the dashboard, why make them go through all the records?
When you upgrade to 2022.1, you will have access to Automation Studio which might be able to fill the spreadsheet for you and then post it back without the UI interface. (Need to ask @timshuwy to see how difficult this would be.)
We are moving to an API-First world. Microsoft designs an API first, then it creates PowerShell scripts to call those APIs in a friendly way, and finally it designs an UI that calls the API.
RPA was invented for automation through the UI. Its purpose is when there is no API available and the UI is the only thing one has, just like Epicor 10.2.400 and older. But RPA is brittle, as you are finding out. Whenever possible, I try to use an API to communicate with Epicor. In the Vantage days, I tried loading parts through an automation program at the UI. It was awful. So I use the Business Objects. It was faster, accurate, and easier to handle errors. But it was tied to the DLLs and versioning was an issue. RESTful APIs changed the world, and are my preference when interfacing with any system, including Kinetic.
I have brought this specific use case to the Development team. They are aware and have done some studies… not sure what the results will be, but this is a known issue.
Yes, this is theoretically possible… Automation studio can export data to a spreadsheet (excel, or google sheets)… then you can also have Automation Studio READ the spreadsheet and process it… THE PROBLEM is that it will NOT allow you to break protocal. If you need to unfirm the PO before modifying it, then this will need to be done. Automation Studio CAN DO THIS as part of the process… 1. Unfirm, 2, modify, 3, re-firm…
But now… the question is: “Is this the correct tool for the job?”.
I am not working with anyone with a current version of Kinetic on Prem, but based on the feedback from Epicor Support “working as designed”, I have to believe this is a flaw for on Prem too.
All of Kinetic UI. The two-decade-old WinForms still work in in K2022. To be clear, there is no limit. It’s just batching 200 records at a time, continuously. There is no retrieve all buttons or option setting.
The never-ending scrolling feature of Kinetic UI, which is designed to reduce unnecessary data transfer, is like many web applications today. As on-prem programmers, we’ve learned inefficient programming methods. (If you own the well, why not have a pond out front with fountains? ) These methods were exposed as we added remote facilities and the performance suffered. Heck, the move from tightly-coupled VB6 to the more MVC ICE had all the same issues we are seeing today. In the various code designers in classic UI today, Epicor downloads the DLLs to do reflection in order to provide “intellisense.” This works great when your server is on the LAN, but oof, when it’s not.
In order to scale, and to serve remote locations better, we - as programmers - have to find newer cheese. We’ve been clever before and we can be clever again. And Epicor may have to change their UI as well. Maybe not to mimic the past but to improve upon it.
BTW, one possible solution is to do what Google does in Gmail. If you pass in a search, you will see a link that says, “Select all records that match” or something similar to that, when there are more records that match the criteria but not yet returned. When you click the link, it does NOT retrieve all records to the browser, but instead it will perform any bulk-action at the server on that entire selection set.
This reminds me why I delay major upgrades a year or two, especially with UI changes
Even though I’m still a believer in general direction Kinetic is headed… I just don’t like the bleeding edge as much as I used to.
End users can make this “interesting” too… tend to think about “efficiency” a LOT differently than I do.
100% that! I’d like to see them add the checkbox “Return all rows” back or Mark’s idea of “matching” into Kinetic. It’s way down out list of things-to-do but if I don’t have to make a custom function I’d be quite happy.
I honestly don’t see myself using Kinetic on a tablet too often, some of our users sure but not myself unless I’m out-of-office without my laptop for some reason.
I was just trying to point out the inefficiencies we accept when it’s just us programmers who are located next to the data center. And by us, I mean me, Epicor, and other Epicor devs. I know I’ve done work where Epicor was running on my laptap and I moved the solution (Configurator) to a test machine with users in several countries, and it was a dog.
The 200 row limit should be addressed in 2022.2
Epicor are planning to re-introduce a user tunable setting that can let the user return up to the max system config setting (5k rows by default). They intentionally do not have a return all rows option as in the classic, browser returning massive amounts of data to the client can result in performance and out of memory issues. There will also be an admin config setting can override the 5k max.
