I’ve also written a batch file that exports these BAQ’s and will eventually put them in a playlist so that I can quickly sync between testing/pilot databases and Live. To keep this automated, I need the exported BAQ labels to match what’s required by the DMT.
I have lots of BAQ’s to do this with, so I would like to stay away from manually updating the column labels as much as possible. I have tried editing the BAQ source files through archived xml files, however this seems to have the similar outcome of having to manually update the column labels.
I’ve always found that frustrating also. I think the Template tool within the DMT is helpful. When you have that many columns, just “create a template” by selecting all the columns you want. Then just copy/paste that over your BAQ export. Hope that helps.
Thanks for the reply, Dan! This is definitely a contender for a solution but not a strong one since I would have to manually update the labels from the BAQ export with the template columns each time.
I’ll be syncing my pilot and test database quite a bit since we are nearing our Go Live date. So, I’m trying to make the syncing as automated (and painless) as possible. Thanks!
But I have a concern, would changing these labels in my production environment break the BAQs and Dashboard that are currently using these tables & fields?
The dashboard columns will stay named whatever they came into the dashboard with when it was created. You can manually re-name the labels in the dashboard and it will copy in the BAQ’s labels over the existing dashboard labels. But that doesn’t happen unless you ask it to.
I don’t believe it will update BAQs automatically but I’m not 100% sure. I feel like existing BAQ fields are records in a table somewhere and the label is a column in that row. Anything existing, like a dashboard, should stay the same. But any new BAQ field will come in with the new label from Extended Properties. Again, I’m not 100% that’s true but that’s my hypothesis.
Long term, I wouldn’t leave my labels like this. The OP was looking for a shortcut to help Go-Live and all the associated DMT copy overs associated with that effort. I wouldn’t think he’d leave them that way when they were finally Live. But we never talked about that.
I guess there’s no real concern. It’s superficial. In practice, I use the BAQ labels primarily for labeling columns in dashboards that are a little more user friendly to read… but then anytime I have to DMT something, I have to relabel them accordingly. If you were comfortable leaving them that way and them showing up in dashboards like that, you could do it with no harm. Or you could relabel the dashboard labels to make them more user friendly and leave the BAQ columns setup with the column names. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a checkbox that said “use column names as labels” or something like that to make DMT from a BAQ easier?
The BAQ fields will take those labels wherever you use them. So if you make new baq’s and dashboards for things other than DMT, they will have these labels. That may not be a good way to present to an end user.
Awww so true! Like CustomerCustID… I forget which DMT table this applies to but it’s one I did not all that long ago.
OK. What if: Now that we can reference other BAQs, could we make a BAQ “template”? Then just grab the appropriate template to start your DMT BAQ and you can filter using any normal means.
Are you referring to the Excel templates? That’s useful when bringing in data from an external source but I have found I will regularly use a BAQ to generate my “spreadsheet” and then I have to deal with updating the column names. I’ve done it so often I know many off the top of my head but I think it would be nice if you could have a list of BAQs in Epicor associated with all the DMT templates and then you could select that to start with (with the labels already named properly). Then it would be a matter of selecting the appropriate records using table criteria or an inner join.
