Dynamics GP provides a built-in set of Internet
fields for users to enter information such as web pages, e-mail
addresses, and FTP sites. What many people don't know is that these are
actually user defined fields and can be changed by an administrator.
This allows a firm to add a second e-mail address or remove the FTP link
if they want to. In this recipe, we'll look at how to customize these
fields.
It is important to keep in mind
when setting up Internet User Defined fields that these settings affect
all of the Internet User Defined field names attached to address IDs
assigned to a Company, Customers, Employees, Items, Salespeople, and
Vendors.
How to do it...
Customizing the Internet
User Defined fields is easy. Let's look at how it is done. For our
example, we'll add the social networking service Twitter as a new
label:
1. Select Administration from the Navigation Pane. Under the Setup and Company headers in the Administration Area Page select Company.
2. Click on the Internet User Defined button and change the description in the Label 4 field to Twitter. Click on OK:
3. Back on the Company Setup screen click on the blue italic letter (I) to the right of the Address ID to open the Internet Information window. In the Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/mpolino. field type
4. Click on the link associated with the Twitter field on the left. This opens a web browser and navigates to my Twitter account so that you can follow me. Click on Save to update the record:
How it works...
The secret to Internet
User Defined fields is how the data is entered. Internet items use a
prefix in the field to identify the type of Internet transaction to be
used with the link. http:// is used for web pages, mailto:// for e-mail, and ftp://
for FTP sites. These prefixes tell Dynamics GP what to do when a link
is clicked on. If no prefix is entered, GP will try to figure out what
to do and may or may not succeed.
If http://www.microsoft.com is entered in the Home Page field, clicking on the link to the left will start the default browser and open the Microsoft web page. If http:// www is, GP figures out that it should open a web page. Just putting in microsoft.com isn't enough for GP to understand that the link corresponds to a web page. Similarly, if a user enters mailto://[email protected] in the E-mail
field and clicks on the corresponding link the default e-mail client
opens up ready to send an e-mail to me. If no prefix is used on an
e-mail address, GP will respond with a "File Not Found" error when the
link is clicked on. It's not smart enough to know that the @ symbol
means that this is an e-mail account. is not included but
Using a prefix in the
Internet User Defined fields explicitly defines how this link should
work and provides the most consistency to users.
There's more...
Some Internet User Defined fields look special but aren't, and some really are special.
Login and password
By default Label 5 is set to Login and Label 6 is set to Password.
These fields are supposed to represent the login and password for one
of the associated web pages or FTP sites. However, these fields are not
encrypted and there is limited security control. So, it may not be
appropriate to leave these fields named Login and Password if a company doesn't want users entering that information here.
Labels 7 and 8
Label 7 and Label 8 in the Internet User Defined Setup
window are special fields that allow a user to look up and attach links
to files located on the computer or the network. Clicking on the label
name on the left opens the associated file. Any of the user defined
fields can hold a filename, not just text. However, the special ability
of labels 7 and 8 to allow users to look up filenames means that
administrators should reserve these fields for file attachments.
