Export D365FO Customer Print Management settings

Print Management settings in D365FO allow users to specify the settings in different places and on different levels. The settings can become quite complex, thus often leading to confusion, difficulties in maintenance and problems when searching for the cause of unexpected behavior. Users sometimes even ask the developers for help, with the requirement to create an X++ procedure that would extract a list of all Customers or Vendors for which their specific Print Management settings have been defined. In this article I will show you how to simply retrieve the D365FO Customer Print Management settings: we will get the list of all Customers having Customer-specific Print Management settings and get a nice overview of their settings.

For this task you will need Docentric Print Management Settings data entity, which you can use completely for free, as it is delivered as part of Docentric AX Free Edition tool.

Module-level Print Management settings

First and most common way of configuring the Print Management is on the module level. All the Print Management reports related to a particular module are found on one form. For example, Print Management settings for Accounts payable module are found on this path: Accounts payable > Setup > Forms > Forms setup > General tab > Print management button. It offers all the reports related to Accounts payable module.

Find more details about Print Management settings per module >>

For any selected report you would want to cover most of the scenarios on the module level.

Node-level Print Management settings

As opposed to the module-level Print Management settings, where you cover the majority of cases, you would use the node-level Print Management settings to specify the settings for a particular customer, vendor, sales quotation table etc. To specify the node-level Print Management setting for the Customer (CustTable) node, you would open the Customer form and click the General > Print management button:

Let’s say that for the Customer US-005 from the above example you have made the following changes to the original (sales module) settings: you have overridden the original record for the Customer invoice document (left image below) and you have created a new copy record for the Free text invoice document (right image below):

 

This will create two node-level D365FO Customer Print Management settings in your system.

How to get the node-level D365FO Customer Print Management settings overview

It often happens that the node-level settings are specified for many customers and that you need to get the overview of all the customer node-specific settings. For example, you need to modify something on some or all of them. Or you need to identify those customers where a specific print destination was configured. Or you want to find the customers where you have configured an Email print destination with a specific From field…

To get the answer to all these questions, we will use the Docentric Print Management settings data entity from the Docentric AX Free Edition tool. We want to export the D365FO Customer Print Management settings into the Excel file. For that purpose, go to the D365FO Data management framework and create a new Export project. Configure it to use the Docentric Print Management Settings data entity and to export into Excel:

Click the Filter button to open the dialog where you can specify the Print management node type as Customers:

Execute the job by clicking the Export button on the toolbar. When the export job has finished you will be able to download the created Excel file and the result will contain one row for each customer node-level setting:

The two yellow-marked rows contain the data for the Customer US-005 from our example above. In addition, we see the three blue-marked rows with the data for the Customer US-007.

How to analyze the exported customer Print Management settings

You can get a lot of interesting information by analyzing the resulting Excel, for example:

  • Column B (DocInstanceNodeType): this is the Print Management node type which we used for filtering the result. We have specified Customers node type, therefore we see only CustTable node type. You can experiment with different node types and see what you will get.
  • Column G (NodeSpecificId): ID od the node, depends on the node type. For the Customers node type it is the customer account number. For the Vendors node type it would be the vendor account number, etc.
  • Column K (DestDocEmailBody): if the print destination is Docentric Email, then this field provides the Email body in HTML format which is specified in this setting. Notice how convenient it is to get the overview of all different Email bodies that were used for different customers and different document types, if for example you need to unify them or find the one which should be corrected. Also note that Email body field doesn’t exist in the standard D365FO Email print destination, but you can get this functionality and use it if you select the improved Docentric Email print destination from the Docentric AX Free Edition tool.

  • Column M (DestDocEmailFrom): another field available in Docentric Email print destination. Again, good example of efficient overview: let’s say that you have been using Email alias (such as sales@our-company.com), but your administrator has informed you that this alias will not be available any longer. Instead you should switch to invoicing@ourcompany.com. This list will greatly simplify the task of identifying the customers where you need to modify the settings. You could take the similar approach when dealing with Email subject or Email To field (columns N and O).
  • Column AW (PrintDestinationDescription): print destination description as seen in the Print Management settings form. Can be useful to distinguish between different print destination types, for example by sorting the Excel by this column.

Our example shows mainly the various settings related to the Docentric Email print destination, but also other print destination types have their specifics and you can analyze and compare them in a similar way.

Learn more about Docentric Print Management settings data entity >>
See how to get and understand all Print Management settings in Excel >>

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