OLE Notes and Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Web Client

In the past years, I have written extensively about Microsoft Dynamics GP OLE Notes and the Dexterity OLE Container application, in the hopes of finding a way to extract the Container documents and links (unsuccessfully so far) as a result of several issues I have encountered in the past with customers attempting to migrate their notes to a different server, see:

All about the Dexterity OLE Container
All About Dexterity OLE Container - Follow Up

My good friend David Musgrave has also written a couple articles on the subject of record notes in two articles as well, see:

Understanding Notes and the Note Index field
OLE Attachments and Record Notes

Now with the release of Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Web Client, a new challenge is presented around the use of OLE Notes: the OLE Container cannot be exposed to the Silverlight application.

The Dexterity OLE Container, from past articles, is a 32-bit C++ application and as such, calls to the paperclip attachment button made from the Silverlight application will launch the Container in the Silverlight application - that is expected.

Let's take the following sequence of events, where an OLE attachment is added to an item number in the rich client environment. The attachment and all the behavior we expect occur normally and we get an indicator of an attachment being present.

Rich Client with OLE Container Note

Under the web client, you will still get an indicator of the record note being present, along with the "OLE Link present." message, but will not be able to access the OLE attachment as there's no paperclip button - and by definition, you cannot load a Win32 program from within a Silverlight application front-end - again, this expected.

Web Client displaying attachment present, but no paperclip button

Upon closing the note window, the note indicator disappears for the record being displayed, conveying the impression that there's no record note attached.

Web Client no longer shows an attachment being present

But back in the rich client, if you retrieve the record once more, the "OLE Link present." message is restored and the OLE attachment is certainly present.

Rich client still shows attachment and re-adds the "OLE Link present" text.

In summary, it seems this is just a behavior you will experience on the Web Client, but rest assured that your notes and attachments are still there, just the visual cue is not updating properly upon closing the note window under Web Client. I am sure the good folks in the Microsoft Dynamics GP Development team are already looking into this.

Now, since you are not able to use the Dexterity OLE Container in the Silverlight application, the alternative is to - perhaps - slowly but surely migrate your notes to the more robust Document Attachment feature. I will talk more about this in my next installment and will also compare it to your traditional Dexterity OLE Container notes.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/