We are currently on LN 10.7 with a lot of custom logic that utilizes standard libraries and needs to be moved to ‘tx’ before moving to the cloud.
We have been requesting public interfaces and have gotten mixed experiences. Here are some examples, which are just provided as such.
- Some requests have just required backporting the public interface from LN CE to LN 10.7 and those have been completed.
- Other requests have asked for public interfaces that standard library functions exist for and they have been granted and completed.
- A request to get a public interface for the sales/purchase application lock handling, which could be deemed trivial, we just wanted to have functionality (lock identifier) that matches standard LN, got rejected. The provided reasons showed that the developer who handled the request was looking for a reason to reject it and he/she did not pay attention to the explanation of why we asked for it. Besides the frustration about the rejection arguments, I can accept this one as we can add the functionality and the chances are slim that it will break if Infor changes something.
- My biggest concern has been about requests for public interfaces that do not have an existing standard library function, e.g., the needed logic is in a session script, which is not following the programming standards formerly known as design principles (aka Infor LN Software Conventions Guide). In our particular example, we need to invoice a subset of billable lines for an order, which can be done from the session, but that would not be productive with our business processes. The request has been rejected without providing any useful information on why. It leaves us at a loss as to what non-conventional requests are acceptable and how we can handle this requirement. Without Infor letting us access standard code, we might not be able to develop this business-critical functionality and become cloud-ready.
- What has your experience been with requesting public interfaces? We can see that the documentation is updated with new ones, but we do not see how many requests are rejected and what reasons are provided.
- Would you consider the DAL methods a form of a public interface that Infor should declare as supported? We have found situations where the DAL only worked when the session was used, e.g., it initialized some data before saving the record or the session called libraries to handle the data integrity. This was not a finance table, which we know that they often lack DAL support. Infor support wanted to reject the issue as not supported and we only succeeded to break the wall when we got creative and reproduced the issue via standard methods, e.g., Excel or Exchange import that uses the DAL.
Kind regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Stephan
