We’re Trying to create a new Bartender Label to be in place of the material tags report in MES. When we make a copy of the MTLTags Report Definition and then try to change the report type to Bartender Labels - we get an error saying “Report Type cannot be set to Bartender Labels because the Report Data Definition contains one or more Temporal Tables”.
Like most Epicor errors, I have the proverbial “WTH does mean”???
Any ideas. Or is this just one of those reports that cannot be setup as a bartender label?
Just wondering.
Thanks
Jeff Henslee
M-B Companies Inc.
Not sure I can help you with this specific issue, but I can throw out another alternative. While I realize that using RDD’s to generate the files that feed into Bartender is possible, all Bartender needs is a formatted text file. I’ve found that adding a fairly simple customization to the system, where either my UI program or a BPM writes the file out to Bartender - completely bypassing Epicor RDD. I trigger it with a button on the calling program.
While you’re adding custom code to the system, I’ve found the flexibility to be worth it. In addition, there’s less clicks for the user (one click versus a few to invoke the report, change the report style, click any parameters, etc.), and the response time is pretty much instantaneous versus the time it takes for Epicor to run it through.
I would warn that you can’t trigger a bartender generated mtl label off the
standard way (clicking print tag). Despite it giving you the option to use
bartender, it will not show your server printers. I had a ticket in with
support but the end result was that bartender isn’t designed to be used
that way (basically is limited to autoprint). You can get around it by
using a bpm or writing to own c# to generate the bartender file
Thanks for the suggestion. While we have created BPM’s and have even used BAM’s to create other Bartender files, I was hoping to create this one without one – since there is logic in the program to print material tags (printing varying numbers of tags with carrying quantities). Surely it can be done, but I was hoping to avoid the complex programming if possible.
Will be looking into other alternatives and how difficult this task might be for custom programming and custom bartender text files.
The complexity isn’t too bad. It’s just the time to do it that’s the real pain.
The format for a bartender trigger file is super easy, there is a header (points to label file, # of copies, other settings) and then the data portion which is basically comma delimited data (I found it easiest to make my format how I want in the generation in code, and then modify the bartender label’s “DATABASE” to interpret the fields. As far as the C# code, really all you have to do is concatenate (a stupid word for building strings) you data and then write to a file wherever your bartender commander is looking (obviously, you’d have to open a share to it)
For the form, there are several ways you could approach it, but I would probably mimic the way E10 does it, with a grid of PN, Qty, and LabelCount (and whatever else you may need)
If you would like additional info I don’t mind sharing some snippets (even if it means Jose gets to laugh at my code)
The nice thing about the BPM route - you can get fairly fancy in there.
For example, you could assign security groups to users that “control” the printer. Then, the BPM can figure out who’s printing, and set the printer automatically. I’ve got one client where we defined the label format on the part master, so particular parts would print one label while other parts print a different label (or a “default”). Depending on your environment, you can pretty much remove user error when they’re having to select run-time parameters.