Adding more comment lines to POP Purchase Orders

Just recently, I was asked by a customer to address an issue with their line item comments truncating at 4 lines. In essence, the customer wanted the ability to print more than 4 lines of comments at the line item level on their purchase orders.

My customer happens to be in the Nuclear Waste Management industry, and as it turns out, they have strict requirements to provide contract information, start/end dates, and a number of regulatory and compliance information on purchase orders. Some of this information is very critical to the transportation of certain products on United States highways. So as you can imagine, the request for additional comment lines was critical.

The following shows an example of what the customer was facing:

Purchasing Comment Entry window and POP Purchase Order Blank form

As you can see, the comments are printing only 4 lines and truncating the rest of the text.

Before going into the details, they are a few articles that guided me through the solution:

How to Display More Than Four Line Item Comments in the "SOP Blank Invoice Form" Report in Sales Order Processing in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Adding more comments to SOP Documents (Developing for Dynamics GP)

Of course, these articles refer to SOP, but the underlying techniques used in them will allow us to make the necessary changes to the report. This blog post should be used in conjunction with the How To article above to provide some additional steps to get the best result for making the changes to the POP Purchase Order report.

Background

Comments for Purchase Order Processing (POP) transactions are entered using a text field which allows for a maximum of 500 characters, as shown above. When the comments are saved, the text field is divided into 4 string fields of 50 characters each, which is printed on the report. The code that parses the text field into the 4 string fields is smart enough to avoid splitting a word oddly. The code will fit as many words as it can up to the last space before the 50 character mark or up to a carriage return (new line). When the POP documents are printed, it is these 4 comment string fields which are printed on the report. This means that if you use carriage returns or type a comment longer than 180-200 characters, you are unlikely to see all of your comment text shown on the report.

If you look at a POP document report, such as the POP Purchase Order Blank Form, you will see that the 4 comment lines are printed using 4 additional footer sections.

POP Purchase Order Blank Form Report Writer Layout showing 4 footers (F3 - F6)

Looking at each of these additional sections (Tools > Section Options), you will see that each one is configured to be Suppressed when the appropriate 'sSuppressCommentX' calculated field is empty. The 'sSuppressCommentX' calculated field is defined to look at the comment string array report field and return an empty string or the actual comment to be printed on that footer. The reason for all this complexity is so that the space for the comment line strings is only taken up when there is actually a comment line to display. If this technique with additional footers with conditional suppression was not used, there would be 4 lines between every POP line item whether it was used or not - not an efficient use of already cramped space.

Solution

The solution is to use the RW_POPLINECommentText user-defined Report Writer function in the system series in a set of calculated fields. The same recommendations apply as with the SOP article above, this is, making each line the maximum 80 characters supported by Report Writer strings and creating 8 lines. This gives the potential for 640 characters and so should easily be able to display the 500 characters of comment text (even without breaking words in half or additional carriage returns).

Why 8 lines? This is so we can place two lines on each of the 4 additional footer sections. If we update the suppression logic correctly, it will mean there will only be the possibility of one blank line between SOP line items. With only 4 section breaks, we can only print 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8 lines at a time, so if there are actually an odd number of lines to be printed, there will be one blank line printed. If there are an even number of lines, then there will be no blank line.

For an explanation on why not using additional footers instead, see Adding more comments to SOP Documents over at Developing for Dynamics GP.

The parameters for the RW_POPLINECommentText function are as follows:

RW_POPLINECommentText()

function returns string OUT_string;
in integer IN_Type;   { POP Type of Document }
in string IN_Number;   { POP Number of Document }
in long IN_Ord;    { Ord Number of Line }
in integer IN_characters;  { Number of Characters per Line }
in integer IN_line;   { Line Number to Return }

Implementation

The steps below assume some knowledge of Report Writer. If you need detailed step by step instructions please look at the How to document.

Line Comments

1. Create 8 calculated fields of result type string for the 8 Line level comment lines:

(C) Line 1 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 1 )

(C) Line 2 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 2 )

(C) Line 3 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 3 )

(C) Line 4 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 4 )

(C) Line 5 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 5 )

(C) Line 6 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 6 )

(C) Line 7 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 7 )

(C) Line 8 Comments = FUNCTION_SCRIPT( RW_POPLINECommentText POP_PO.PO Type POP_PO.PO Number  popPOLineRollupTemp.Ord 80 8 )

Note: The only difference for each calculated field is the line number in the field name and the line number constant as the last parameter.

2. Expand each of the comment additional footers to 2 lines height.

3. Move the 4 existing Comment fields to the right of the report.

4. Double Click on each of the 4 old Comment array fields and set the Visibility to Invisible.

Comment Footers and Invisible Fields

5. From Calculated Fields drag out the 8 new calculated fields placing two fields in each section. Drag out the field width as desired (at least 370).

Calculated fields on footer sections

6. The 4 sSuppressCommentX calculated fields will need to be changed to conditional fields and the return type changed to Integer, as shown:

Calculated Field definition

sSuppressComment1 = F6_LAST (C) Line 1 Comments = "" AND F6_LAST (C) Line 2 Comments = ""

sSuppressComment2 = F5_LAST (C) Line 3 Comments = "" AND F5_LAST (C) Line 4 Comments = ""

sSuppressComment3 = F4_LAST (C) Line 5 Comments = "" AND F4_LAST (C) Line 6 Comments = ""

sSuppressComment4 = F3_LAST (C) Line 7 Comments = "" AND F3_LAST (C) Line 8 Comments = ""

After all these changes, it's time to save the report and test:

Purchase Order Blank Form

Now we can see the full line item comment displays nicely on the report.

Downloads

You can download the package file for this customization here.