Synchronizing Great Plains macros with other activities.

[kdenman]

I am trying to figure out the best way to automate processes that involve running Great Plains macros at the start of or in the middle of a chain of events:

A) Payroll Integration
1) Payroll manager places 2 export files from our payroll provider on the network
2) A DTS package imports those files in to SQL2000
3) An SQL script modifies data in the tables
4) A Great Plains macro running Integration Manager is used to create a Journal entry from the data in the tables.

Step one happens ad-hoc. That is, the timing is not predictable, so I can't have the whole chain of events run through the SQL and Windows task schedulers. All I can think of is to loop looking for the presence of flag files somewhere on the network and use the presence of a flag file to launch the next step.


B) Month end dumps to our data warehouse
1) A Great Plains macro is run by a user to export a report to a tab delimited file. Timing of this step is variable
2) When the macro is complete, a DTS job needs to load the data into a table.
3) An SQL script needs to clean up/denormalize the data.

Again, how do I synchronize the tasks so that Step 2 happens immediately after step 3?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

 

[winthropdc]

Macros run once the background queue is empty and the foreground is waiting for user input.

I would suggest that you get your macro to "do something" when it is finished to start the DTS process.

This could be selecting a shortcut, or opening a window which has VBA code on it.

David Musgrave [MSFT]
Escalation Engineer - Microsoft Dynamics GP
Microsoft Dynamics Support - Asia Pacific

Microsoft Dynamics (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions)

http://www.microsoft.com/Dynamics

http://blogs.msdn.com/DevelopingForDynamicsGP

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