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Developing connections with Internet user-defined fields

Dynamics GP provides a built-in set of Internet fields for users to enter information such as web pages, e-mail addresses, and FTP sites. What many people don't know is that these are actually user-defined fields and can be changed by an administrator that allows firms to add a second e-mail address or remove the FTP link if they want to. In this recipe, we'll look at how to customize these fields.

It is important to keep in mind when setting up Internet user-defined fields that these settings affect all the Internet user-defined field names attached to address ID's assigned to a company, customers, employees, items, salespeople, and vendors.

How to do it...

Customizing the Internet user-defined fields is easy, so let's take a look at how to do it. For our example, we'll add the social networking service Twitter as a new label.

Select Administration from the navigation pane. Under the Setup and Company headers in the Administration area page, pick Company.
Click on the Internet User Defined button and change the Image description next to Label 4 to Twitter. Click on OK.
Back on the Company Setup screen, click on the blue italic letter "I" to the right of the Address ID to open the Internet Information window. In the Twitter field, type http://www.twitter.com/azurecurve.
Click on the link associated with the Twitter field on the left. This opens a web browser and navigates to my Twitter account so that you can follow me. Click on Save to update the record.

How it works...

The secret to Internet user-defined fields is how the data is entered. Internet items use a prefix in the field to identify the type of Internet transaction to be used with the link: http:// is used for web pages, Mailto:// for e-mail, and ftp:// for FTP sites. These prefixes tell Dynamics GP what to do when a link is clicked, and if no prefix is entered, Dynamics GP will try to figure out what to do and may or may not succeed.

If http://www.microsoft.com is entered in a field, the link to the left will start the default browser and open the Microsoft web page. If http:// is not included, but www is, GP figures out that it should open a web page. Just putting in Microsoft.com isn't enough for GP to understand that the link corresponds to a web page. Similarly, if a user enters <mailto://mpolino@gmail.com> and clicks the link, the default e-mail client opens up and is ready to send an e-mail to me. If no prefix is used with an e-mail address, GP will respond with a "File Not Found" error when the link is clicked. It's not smart enough to know that the @ symbol means that this is an e-mail account.

Using a prefix in the Internet user-defined fields explicitly defines how this link should work and provides the most consistency to users.

There's more...

Some Internet user-defined fields look special but aren't and some really are special.

Login and password

By default, the Internet user-defined Label 5 field is named Login and the Label 6 field is named Password. These fields are supposed to represent the login and password for one of the associated web pages or FTP sites. However, these fields are not encrypted and there is limited security control, so it may not be appropriate to leave these fields named Login and Password if a company doesn't want users entering that information here.

Label 7 and Label 8

Label 7 and Label 8 in Internet user defined fields are special fields that allow a user to look up and attach links to files located on the computer or the network. Clicking on the label name on the left opens the associated file. Other fields can accept files and these fields can still accept a prefix and link or free form text, but their special ability to look up file names mean that administrators should consider reserving them for file attachments.