Introduction

The main purpose of our .Net API is to access our Business Logic Views which I’ve blogged on in these articles:

An Introduction to the Sage 300 ERP .Net API
Starting to Program the Sage 300 ERP Views in .Net
Composing Views in the Sage 300 ERP .Net API
Using the Sage 300 ERP View Protocols with .Net
Using Browse Filters in the Sage 300 ERP .Net API
Using the Sage 300 .Net API from ASP.Net MVC
Error Reporting in Sage 300 ERP
Sage 300 ERP Metadata
Sage 300 ERP Optional Fields

However there are a number of simple things that you need to do repeatedly which would be a bit of a pain to use the Views every time to do these. So in our .Net API we provide a number of APIs that give you efficient quick mechanisms to access things like company, fiscal calendar and currency information.

With Sage Summit 2014 just a few weeks away (you can still register here), I can’t pre-empt any of the big announcements here in my blog (as much as I’d like to), so perhaps a bit of an easier .Net article instead. For many these examples are fairly simple, but I’m always getting requests for source code, and I happen to have a test program that exercises these APIs that I can provide as an examples. This program was to help ensure and debug these APIs for our 64 Bit/Unicode version which might indicate why it tends to print rather a strange selection of fields from some of the classes.

Sample Program

The sample program for this article is a simple WinForms application that uses the Sage 300 ERP API to get various information from these helper classes and then populates a multi-line edit control with the information gathered. The code is the dotnetsample (folder or zip) located in the folder on Google Drive at this URL. The code is hard coded to access SAMLTD with ADMIN/ADMIN as the user id and password. You may need to change this in the session.open to match what you have installed/configured on your local system. I’ve been building and running this using Visual Studio 2013 with the latest SPs and the latest .Net.

The Session Class

The session class is the starting point for everything else. Besides opening the session get establishing the DBLink, you can use this class to get some useful version information as well as some information about the user like their language.

The DBLink Class

From the session you get a DBLink object that is then your connection to the database and everything in it. From this object you can open any of our Business Logic Views and do any processing that you like. Similarly you can also get quick access to currency and fiscal calendar information from here. Of course you could do much of this by opening various Common Service Views, but this would involve quite a few calls. Additionally the helper APIs provide some caching and calculation support.

The Company Class

Accessing the company property from the DBLink object is your quick shortcut to the various Company options information stored in Common Services in the CS0001 View. This is where you get things like the home currency, number of fiscal periods, whether the company is multi-currency or get address type information. Generally you will need something from here in pretty much anything you do.

The FiscalCalendar Class

You can get a FiscalCalendar object from the FiscalCalendar property of the DBLink. In accounting fiscal periods are very important, since everything is eventually recorded in the General Ledger in a specific fiscal year/fiscal period. G/L mostly doesn’t care about exact dates, but really cares about the fiscal year and period. For accurate accounting you always have to be very careful that you are putting things in the correct fiscal year and periods. In Common Services we setup our financial years and fiscal periods assigning them various starting and ending dates. Corporate fiscal years don’t have to correspond to a calendar year and usually don’t. For instance the Sage fiscal year starts on October 1, and ends on September 30.

This object then gives you methods and properties to get the starting and ending dates for fiscal periods, years or quarters. Further it helps you calculate which fiscal year/period a particular date falls in. Often all these calculations are done for you by the Views, but if you are entering things directly into G/L these can be quite useful. Some of the parameters to these methods are a bit cryptic, so perhaps the sample program will help with anyone having troubles.

The Currency Classes

There are several classes for dealing with currencies, there are the Currency, CurrencyTable and CurrencyRate classes. You get these from the DBLink’s GetCurrency, GetCurrencyTable and GetCurrencyRate methods. There is also a GetCurrencyRateTypeDescription method to get the description for a given Currency Rate Type.

The Currency object contains information for a given currency like the description, number of decimals and decimal separator. Combined with the Currency Rate Type, we have a Currency Table entry for each Currency Code and Currency Rate Type. Then for each of these there are multiple CurrencyRate’s for each Currency on a given date.

So if you want to do some custom currency processing for some reason, then these are very useful objects to use. The sample program for this article has lots of examples of using all of these.

Remember to always test your programs against a multi-currency database. A common bug is to do all your testing against SAMINC and then have your program fail at a customer site who is running multi-currency. Similarly it helps to test with a home currency like Japanese Yen that doesn’t have two decimal places.

Summary

This was just a quick article to talk about some of the useful helper functions in our Sage 300 ERP .Net API that help you access various system data quickly. You can perform any of these functions through the Business Logic Views, but since these are used so frequently, they save a lot of programming time.