Video Change the target print destination in Print management settings in bulk – Part 5 of 8

Assume that you are using SSRS Email print destination for printing your invoices but at the same time, you have overridden Print management settings for hundreds of customers in order to specify different email recipients and subject for each customer. But then you’ve learned about Email tokens that allow you to specify the customer primary contact or invoice purpose email address, or about Docentric Free Edition that gives you opportunity to specify the email body and use placeholders such as Account number and Invoice ID in all settings. Now you want to switch the target print destination from SSRS Email to Docentric Email for your existing Print management settings and enjoy all newly discovered benefits. What are your options?

You can patiently & passionately start changing manually one-by-one each of the customer specific Print management settings in D365FO using the Print management setup form, or you can give a task to your developer - to update all these settings directly in the database. This would be a pretty hard job to do anyway since the print settings are saved in the database as containers (i.e. binary fields).

Learn how Print management settings are saved in the database tables >>

Luckily, with Docentric Print Management Data Entity you can perform the updating of the settings in bulk, all by yourself, using Excel, without help of a developer.

In this tutorial, we will first use the Export data project in the Data Management workspace to add the Docentric Print Management Settings data entity, set Excel as Output data format and define the filter as follows: USMF as Company, Customer invoice as Document type and Customers as Print management node type. Then we will perform the export and download the resulting Excel file.

The example from this tutorial works only for the non-conditional Print management settings. Conditional Print management settings will be skipped during the import.
For the data migration scenarios where conditional Print management settings are involved, please use the Docentric Print management package data entity.

After explaining the structure and meaning of each column in Excel, we will change the appropriate columns which affect the target print destination selection and its settings. Since there are a lot of columns in Excel we don’t need for our scenario, we can hide them to make our job easier.

The selected target print destination is stored in the PRINTMEDIUMTYPE column, while the corresponding SSRS email settings are stored in DESTSSRSEMAILXXX columns (e.g. DESTSSRSEMAILSUBJECT) and Docentric email settings in DESTDOCEMAILXXX columns (DESTDOCEMAILSUBJECT).

We will change the value in the PRINTMEDIUMTYPE column from Email (which means SSRS Email) to Email_DC (which means Docentric Email), and copy the values from SSRS email settings columns to Docentric columns.

The same suffix _DC applies to other print destinations, for example File/Printer/Screen are values used for SSRS print destinations while File_DC/Printer_DC/Screen_DC represent Docentric print destinations.

The value of the USEDPACKEDPRINTSETTINGS column is by default set to Yes, which means that the packed value of the settings stored in the PRINTJOBSETTINGSSTR column will be used during the import (the binary representation of the settings, because of how they are stored in the database). Change it to No if you want your previous changes in Excel to apply during the import.

After importing the Excel with changed settings back to D365FO, we will confirm that the target print destination has been switched from SSRS Email to Docentric Email in Print management setup of the sample customer.

WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED

  • How to export customer specific Print management settings to Excel.
  • Which columns in Excel to change to switch the target print destination from SSRS Email to Docentric Email: PRINTMEDIUMTYPE and DESTDOCEMAILXXX.
  • How to import the modified Excel back to the D365FO and this way apply the changes made in Excel.

NEXT (Part 6 of 8): Learn how to change email settings in Print management setup in bulk >>

Docentric Print Management Data Entity is part of Docentric Free Edition, so you can use it completely for free.

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