Hello everybody,

today I want to speak about very useful feature in Visual Studio.

Sometime you may need some kind of source of inspiration from Acumatica source code. But quite often that source of inspiration have text, which is scattered over multiple lines of code.

For example, you want to find file which has PXProjection text in one line, and word SOOrder in the next line. How to make such a search? Window below appears once you click on Ctrl + Shift + F:

with help of .*\r?\n.* you can make search over multiple files. Take a note of what Visual Studio showed to me in output results once I've clicked on Find All:

and then, you can double click on any of those lines, and make sure, that you found something, that is PXProjection, with SOOrder in some of the next lines:

Summary

With such simple technique you can easily hunt for any lines of code in Acumatica framework, and enhance your search results.

Hello everybody,

today  I want to share one line of code for Acuminator for error message:

PX1016 A DAC extension must include the public static IsActive method with the bool return type. Extensions which are constantly active reduce performance. Suppress the error if you need the DAC extension to be constantly active.

In case if you don't want to suppress Acuminator with a comment, you can do something like this inside of your extension:

public static bool IsActive() => true;

Certainly it is not the most elegant way of doing that, as better way could be usage of some attribute for this purpose, or for example use inheritance, but as of now, the smallest amount of code, you can use that line of code which is presented here. 

Hello everybody,

recently for me it was needed to find out all key fields of DAC class. Code below does this:

public List<string> GetKeyFieldsOfDAC(Type dacClass)
{
    var result = new List<string>();
    var properties = dacClass.GetProperties().ToList(); 
    
    foreach (PropertyInfo info in properties)
    {
        var attrs = info.GetCustomAttributes(true);
        foreach (object attr in attrs)
        {
            if (attr.HasProperty("IsKey"))
            {
                dynamic typedAttribute = attr;
                if (typedAttribute.IsKey)
                {
                    result.Add(info.Name);
                }
            }
        }
    }
 
    return result;
}

And HasProperty method implementation goes below:

public static bool HasProperty(this object objectToCheck, string property)
{
    try
    {
        var type = objectToCheck.GetType();
        var prop = type.GetProperty(property);
        if (prop != null)
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    catch (AmbiguousMatchException) // it means we have more then one property
    {
        return true;
    }
 
    return false;
}

 That is not the most elegant solution in my life, and if you want to suggest a better one, please feel free to suggest.

Hello everybody,

today I want to leave a short note on how to avoid Copy/paste with help of custom attributes. 

Imagine following scenario. You have some set of duplicated code, which you need to apply at FieldSelecting . One of the ways of achieving this can be creation of some class and method within this class, which will handle that functionality, and then just copy/paste creation of the instance of the class at any place, where you need to have that business logic applied.

But you can use another way. You can use custom attributes. You can create your attribute, and then use that attribute over all places, where you may have a need for calling your business logic. In order to work that properly you'll need to inherit your Attribute from PXEventSubscriberAttribute, IPXFieldSelectingSubscriber . For example you can accomplish it like this:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Property | AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Parameter | AttributeTargets.Method)]
public class SomeAttribute : PXEventSubscriberAttribute, IPXFieldSelectingSubscriber
{
    protected Type _TargetField;
    protected Type _DacType;
    
 
    public SomeAttribute(Type dacType, Type targetField)
    {
        _DacType = dacType;
        _TargetField = targetField;
    }
 
    public virtual void FieldSelecting(PXCache sender, PXFieldSelectingEventArgs e)
    {
       var graph = sender.Graph;
       //and some other logic
    }

Also this can be applied to the field like this:

 public class YourDacClass

{

    [Some(typeof(DacClass), typeof(DacClass.someField))]
    [PXUIField(DisplayName = "Value")]
    public virtual string SomeField { get; set; }

}

and that's it. Now you can have move your duplication logic to attribute SomeAttribute, and enjoy smaller amount of code.

Hello everybody,

today I want to leave a note on usage of RowPersisting event.

Quite often I see situations, when RowPersisting is used for making additional insertions to database. Also quite often I see cases when some additional inserts being performed to database. 

I want to warn against such an approach. Reason for that is that during RowPersisting event, Acumatica opens transaction scope. Because of that, additional readings from db, or additional persists to db in scope of RowPersisting may lead to performance degradation and even deadlocks. 

Purpose of RowPersisting event is kind of latest resort, in which you can modify your record before putting it to database. And it shouldn't be used for some other purposes. Other purposes of RowPersisting event is validate record before it was putted to database, or cancel commit operation through throwing of an exception.

Hello everybody,

today I want to describe following use case. Quite often it is needed to persist to database one or another DAC class, which is filled by some data. 

As usually I see people do this via hard coding of DAC class inside of the Graph. But today I want to share with you a way of persisting DAC class without hardcoding it as a view. 

In order to accomplish this, you can use following graph:

public class ImportEntitiesInsertion : PXGraph<ImportEntitiesInsertion>
{
    public string AddView(Type dacType)
    {
        var viewName = "_DYNAMIC_" + dacType.GetLongName();
        if (!this.Views.ContainsKey(viewName))
        {
            var command = BqlCommand.CreateInstance(typeof(Select<>), dacType);
            var newView = new PXView(this, true, command);
            Views.Add(viewName, newView);
            Views.Caches.Add(dacType);
        }
        return viewName;
    }
}

After that, in some other place of the code, you can use this graph like this:

var graphForInsertion = PXGraph.CreateInstance<ImportEntitiesInsertion>();
var dacType = typeof(SOOrder); 
var viewName = graphForInsertion.AddView(dacType);
 
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    var newOrd = new SOOrder();
    graphForInsertion.Views[viewName].Cache.Insert(newOrd);
}
graphForInsertion.Persist();

 What I especially like about this approach, is that records will be persisted initially in the cache, and only after you'll call Persist, all bunch of records will be persisted to database.

Hello everybody,

today I want to leave a short snippet on how to override methods in CreateMatrixItemsImpl graph extension. Below goes code snippet you can use for this purpose:

public class CreateMatrixItemsImplExt : PXGraphExtension<CreateMatrixItems.CreateMatrixItemsImpl, CreateMatrixItems>
{
    public override void Initialize()
    {
        base.Initialize();
    }
}

With help of this code fragment you can override and customize a bit more Matrix management of Acumatica. 

Hello everybody,

today I want to leave a short note on Execution Timeout Expired. In case if you face it on your local dev environment, then consider adding following key in your web.config:

<add name="PXSqlDatabaseProvider" type="PX.Data.PXSqlDatabaseProvider, 
PX.Data" ... queryTimeout="100" />

With that addition, you'll be able to execute long running queries without timeout. 

NB

But keep in mind, that such addition can affect performance of Acumatica for some cases. So use that freely for your dev instance, and be careful with your production instance.

Hello everybody,

recently one of the colleagues asked me how to make selector from Attributes values. Also that request seem trivial, but still took some time, especially with usage of FBQL query to build. 

Below goes template you may use if you'll need some kind of selector for attributes by some predefined value:

public class SOOrderExt : PXCacheExtension<SOOrder>
    {
        public class Codes
        {
            public const string MediaCode = "MEDIACODE";

            public class mEdiaCode : BqlType<IBqlString, string>.Constant<mEdiaCode>
            {
                public mEdiaCode() : base("mEdiaCode")
                {
                }
            }

            public const string OrdOrigin = "ORDORIGIN";

            public class ordOrigin : BqlType<IBqlString, string>.Constant<ordOrigin>
            {
                public ordOrigin() : base("ORDORIGIN")
                {
                }
            }
        }

        [PXSelector(typeof(SearchFor<CSAnswers.value>.Where<CSAnswers.attributeID.IsEqual<Codes.ordOrigin>>))]
        [PXDBString(50)]
        public string SomeValue1 { get; set; }

        [PXSelector(typeof(SearchFor<CSAnswers.value>.Where<CSAnswers.attributeID.IsEqual<Codes.mEdiaCode>>))]
        [PXDBString(50)]
        public string SomeValue { get; set; }
    }

 For me it was also interesting to note, that in the past it was common to use for Selector combination of PXSelector with Search, but in FBQL you'll need PXSelector with SearchFor.

Hello everybody,

today I want to leave a short note on how to connect Acumatica with MySql. Recently for me was needed to organize connection between API project which send requests to Acumatica and MySql database. In codebase I've seen following line:

 using MySqlX.XDevAPI.Relational;

 But when I've tried to find nuget package MySqlX, I've find nothing useful. After a bit of googling I've discovered that it is needed to have referenced MySql.Data package. After I've added MySql.Data package on my project, all MySqlX staff become active, and I was able to build and execute my project