1. James Blankenship March , 2018
QAD EE
Customizations
James Blankenship
March , 2018

2. Agenda James Blankenship Biography Type of Customizations
Tools of The Trade
Custom Logic
Retrieve Data
Update Data
Q & A

3. Biography James Blankenship Joined Logan Consulting in early 2016
QAD implementation experience since 1993
QAD Certifications
Supply Chain
Technical Implementation: Enterprise Edition
Based in Atlanta, GA

4. Please Note….
This presentation is not intended to be detailed training
It is an attempt to convey general functionality
Does not prescribe any design recommendations

5. Types of Customizations
QAD EE Customizations
Types of Customizations
UI Customizations
We will not cover this in this session
Add additional logic to a business component
Query Data from a business component
Update Data in a business component

6. Tools of The Trade Determine Business Component
How do you figure out what business component you want/need to customize
Standard Business Component Documentation
How to use the QAD business component documentation
CT Log (Debugger)
What is the CT Log
How do you use the CT Log
Use the CT Log to debug your customizations

7. Business Component
The first step in is to figure out what business component to use.
The simplest method is the Right-Click on the menu option and select Properties
The program name will contain the name of the business component along with the activity.
It takes the form or urn:cbf:COMPONENT.ACTIVITY

8. Business Component
In this example, I selected the menu option Business Relation Modify
You can see the name of the business component is BBusinessRelation
The activity is Modify

9. Documentation
QAD had provided documentation for all of the business components via HTML.
In version prior to 2016EE, you will need to copy the HTML to your tomcat server.
In 2016EE and later version, the HTML documentation is installed automatically on the tomcat server.
The URL to reach the documentation is:

10. Documentation

11. Documentation
For each Business Component you may see some or all of the following sections:
Public data item
Other data items
API Queries
API Methods
Public Methods
Other Methods
Activities

12. Documentation Public Data Items Other Data Items
These are attributes of the business component that you can access or set via the methods:
GetPublicData
SetPublicData
Other Data Items
These are attributes that are internal to the business component
You can access these items, but you cannot change their values

13. Documentation API Queries API Methods
These are constructs that are used to query the business component
The API indicates that there are pre-built include files to call the query on the Appserver and cleanup afterwards
API Methods
These are methods to access the business component
The API indicates that there are pre-built include files to call the method on the Appserver and cleanup afterwards

14. Documentation Public Methods Other Methods
These are methods that are typically called from other components
You can still call these methods
Other Methods
These are methods that can be accessed in the business component, but require you to manage all aspects of the method.
In the QAD documentation, these are methods that “do not belong to one of the above categories”

15. Documentation Activities
Not all business components have activities defined
These are the items that usually appear on the menu and are exposed directly to the end user.

16. CT Log
The CT Log is a tool created to primarily aid in the debugging of the QAD business objects
But it is also a great tool to understand what is happening “behind the scenes”.
Using the CT Log, you can follow what business objects and methods are being called from a standard QAD program.
The CT Log only works for the EE Financial business objects. It does not work for the operation module

17. CT Log To enable the CT Log, use the menu “Set Debug Level”
In order to enable the debug logging, you cannot have any other programs running when you start.
After you enable the debug log, you should run the program you want to learn about.

18. CT Log
Here are the typical settings I use.

19. CT Log
After running the program (I ran Business Relation Modify) you will access the log via “View CT Logfile”

20. CT Log
Here I can see the API bbusinessrelation.selectbusinessrelation was called.
Here you can see the parameters that were used in the call

21. CT Log
In order to use the CT Log to debug your customizations or debug operational code that calls a finance business object, you will need to update the file cbserver.xml
Typically this file in found in {QAD}/config/cbserver.xml
Set the debug level to 31.
<DebugLevel>31</DebugLevel>
You will have to restart the financial appserver after making this change.
This change will log calls from ALL users, not just yours.

22. Types of Customizations
QAD EE Customizations
Types of Customizations
UI Customizations
Add additional logic to a business component
Query Data from a business component
Update Data in a business component

23. QAD EE Customizations UI Customizations
We will not cover this in this session
These are used to add custom fields to the business component
They can then be added to screens and views
Add additional logic to a business component
QAD has provided a layered structure to add logic to an existing business component
For each method in the business component, there is a before and after procedure that can be modified

24. QAD EE Customizations The templates can be found in
{Qad}/build/catalog/fin-customization/{version}/template/{component}.p
All customizations for a particular business component are stored in this one procedure
Un-comment the before or after procedure that you want to customize.
The main input and output parameters are documented inside the code.

25. QAD EE Customizations Query Data from a business object
In previous versions, developers would access the data in the database by directly querying the database tables.
In the EE Financial Module, developers should access the data via the Query methods.
Using this method, the developer does not need intimate knowledge of the schema and table relations
This approach will allow your custom code to be independent from schema changes that QAD may make

26. Custom Logic
When you uncomment the procedure, you will not explicitly define the input/output parameters
Each procedure is version specific. So if you install a financial patch, you will need to verify if the version has changed
The modified version of the template will be stored in {QAD}/customizations/fin

27. Custom Logic

28. Custom Logic

29. Custom Logic

30. Query Data
You can use the query methods to access data from the business component.
This is how you should always access data from the EE Finance module.
You should no longer be accessing the database directly
By using this method, you are no longer concerned where the data is stored and what the internal data relations are.
This is a huge shift in thinking from the old way

31. Query Data
Since the queries have pre-defined include files to use, they are very straight forward to implement
The includes files are found
fin-src-proxy/{version}/proxy/{component}/*
For each API method, you will see two include files
{component}def.i
{component}run.i
proxy/bbusinessrelation/businessrelationbyidcodedef.i
proxy/bbusinessrelation/businessrelationbyidcoderun.i
The “def” include file is what you use to define the necessary variables, temp-tables, and datasets

32. Query Data
The “run” include file is what you use to actually run the method

33. Query Data

34. Update Data
As with any QAD customization you should never directly update the database.
With the Financial API’s, QAD has given us the ability to perform custom updates to the database without impacting the referential integrity of the database.
These API’s are found in the same documentation.

35. Update Data
You will need to build the dataset according to the documentation for the business object you need to update.
One key field in all of the temp-tables is a field named “tc_status”. The values for this field are:
“C” – Change
“N” – New
“D” – Delete
If your leave the tc_status blank, your changes will not be applied when you call the API. You will also receive a status that shows no errors!

36. Update Data

37. Update Data

38. Update Data

39. Q & A