Something that has always frustrated me when using the SalesLogix Web client was how the picklist control only shows four items in the dropdown and you have to scroll up or down to see the rest. This works fine for lists with only a few items, but for bigger lists it is a huge pain. It wasn't until a coworker was asked by a customer that I gave it any thought about how to go about changing this. Luckily, it's a pretty easy change to make. Read more

When integrating another system, application, or website with SalesLogix there are many options. If you're need to make connections to the SalesLogix database via the provider using user credentials you either need to prompt the user for login (again) or you can pass the connection information along to the other system. Read more

When you're developing an application or customization using SData for SalesLogix, the fewer trips you make to the server the better. Moving data back and forth across the wire will always be the biggest bottleneck in your code, so making use of nested payloads will save you some trips by bringing all the data you're after back in one pass. Read more

If you've followed my posts on Sublogix, or even better, given Sublogix a spin, you'll know that if you're doing SalesLogix development Sublogix can save you a ton of time and give you a much easier to use data access and entity model. This post will show you how to extend the Sublogix entities to give you even easier access and save even more time. Read more

A couple of weeks ago I announced the .NET Extensions Helper open source library. I figured it was time for a more complete walkthrough so this post will show a video of how to get the library and use it to embed a .NET UserControl on a SalesLogix account tab. Let's take a look. Read more

Imagine this. The full, awesome power of the SalesLogix Mobile client, embedded in Outlook that shows the matching contact from the context of the currently selected e-mail in Outlook. Pretty awesome thought, right? Well, it's an idea that I have in the works, and not all that far off. Read more

One of the many great things about developing for the SalesLogix Windows client using .NET Extensions is that you are able to unit test your code. However, since .NET Extensions are passed references to the running instance of SalesLogix, it's important to be able to mock those objects so you can test properly. Best of all, this also allows you to fully test and debug within Visual Studio without the need to have SalesLogix even running. Read more

If you're working in the SalesLogix Windows (LAN) client, why not make as most use as possible of a modern development environment, language, and tools? The SalesLogix .NET Extensions feature in the SalesLogix Windows client is one of the best, and likely least used, features in the SalesLogix Windows client development story. A choice bewteen using an out-dated development environment and VBScript, with no possibility of using source control or a true multi-developer experience verses using Visual Studio, with source control, a modern language and framework where the sky is the limit? I'll take the latter any day. Still not convinced? The .NET Extensions Helper library comes to the rescue. This new open source project from Customer FX will make embedding .NET controls in SalesLogix a breeze. Read more

I've pushed version 1.2 of Sublogix to NuGet. There's some changes in how the custom entity templates are created by default. In previous versions of Sublogix, the custom entity templates used the display names for tables and fields in SalesLogix to create classes and properties. This caused several problems which this version addresses Read more

In this fourth post in the SalesLogix SData series, I will introduce how to write queries for SalesLogix SData and will point to a useful resource as you get started, or more comfortable with SData. View the SalesLogix SData series index SData Query Language... Read more

If you followed my last two posts, you'll know some basics of what SData is and how to get it to use in your projects. In this post, we will take this a step further and look at how to actually use it, starting with how to query data from SalesLogix. Read more

In my previous post, an Overview of SData, I outlined the working parts and anatomy of the web enabled API for SalesLogix known as SData. In this post I will show you how to take your first step with how to get the SData Client Library. Read more

Chances are, if you work or use SalesLogix (or any Sage product) you've heard of SData by now. SData is a basically a web enabled API for SalesLogix allowing you to interact with SalesLogix data from an external application or website. The great thing about SData is that it is a specification that is implemented via RESTful web services. This means you're not limited to using SData with a particular technology (such as exclusively via .NET). In a nutshell, SData works via sending and receiving XML payloads via a URL. Pretty simple. This article will take a high-level overview of SData as an introduction (which means there will be several more in-depth posts on the way). Read more

Some of you have reported that you've been experiencing errors mentioning "getcp" when using Git Extensions for SalesLogix. This post will outline the problem and show how to fix it. Read more

The SalesLogix Group Explorer has become a widely used tool for tracking down issues with SalesLogix groups, allowing you to see the group definition, conditions, layout, and underlying SQL for any SalesLogix group. Best of all it's a free tool. This tool has been updated to work on 64-bit computers as well as all versions of SalesLogix from version 7.2 up to the most recent version 7.5.3. Read more

I'd like to introduce a new open source project from Customer FX that allows you to create and run background tasks in the SalesLogix Web platform. Background Tasks for SalesLogix provides a framework for you to use to build custom tasks that will run on an interval and perform some action in the background while the SalesLogix Web platform is running. Read more

Sublogix, the simple repository and entity model for SalesLogix, is now available via the NuPack package management system! You can now easily get Sublogix to use in your own custom SalesLogix projects. Best of all, you can get it easier than ever using the NuPack package management system. Read more

A few weeks ago I announced Sublogix. Sublogix is Customer FX project that provides a simple repository for SalesLogix development, allowing you to use an entity model and repository in any version of SalesLogix and is great for use in .NET Extensions in the LAN client, stand-alone or addon applications for SalesLogix or whatever. Death to SQL statements. Things are progressing nicely with Sublogix so I decided it was time to give you a closer look. Read more

When using Git, or really any source control system, you don't want everything in your SalesLogix model to be under source control. There are some files that the Application Architect uses for it's own purposes and volatile files that have no importance for your purposes and are recreated as needed. These files that change often with no importance to what you're working on can make things difficult when working with source control since every time a developer pushes changes, that are pulled by another developer these files will need to be merged. Doing this every time will get old fast. Git has the built in ability to exclude files from source control. Let's take a look at how. Read more

Something that was born out of a project I've been working on is a simple repository for SalesLogix that supports all the way back to SalesLogix v6.2 up to the current 7.5.3, both LAN and Web as well as stand alone applications and utilities. I've named it Sublogix. Sublogix is a simple object model and repository for SalesLogix. Sublogix is not meant to replace the SalesLogix Repository that lives in SalesLogix Web. It's purpose is to give you the ability to work with SalesLogix entity objects no matter what environment you're in. Read more

In the last post in the Git for the SalesLogix Developer series, I outlined how to set up a repository. Once that is complete, other developers can use that repository to collaborate on the project. This post outlines how to use a repository and bring it locally so you can use it for development. Read more

If you've been following along in the Git for the SalesLogix Developer series, you should now have Git installed and configured. Now it's time to start putting it to use. In this post (and included video), I will outline the steps to take an existing SalesLogix project and put it under Git source control. Setting up the initial repository is not a hard task, but knowing all the steps is the only way to get it done. Read more

In this second post in the "Git for the SalesLogix Developer" series, we will be taking a look at how to install and configure Git. This tutorial will give you everything you need to know if you are new to Git so you can get it all set up and ready to use. In a later post we'll look at how to use Git, but it all starts with knowing how to get started. Read more

The first in a new series of posts on how to use Git for source control in SalesLogix development, this post will introduce Git, some Git terminology and some of the software you'll use. Read more

Using external assemblies in SalesLogix development, rather than built in Code Snippets, is a better & more efficient way to customize SalesLogix entities, with far less headaches. Some of the benefits include a better and more complete development environment and having all your code in one place (instead of digging around through all the entities to get to the code). Let's take a look at how to do it. Read more