My client made an interesting request. They print pick lists and shipping labels (UPS), they NEVER print invoices. Currently, if an order contains 5 line items, there is one pick list and 5 shipping labels (all items ship in their own boxes). What they would like to do is get one pick list/label combination per line item without having to create individual orders for each line item. Has anyone managed to do this?

--Randy

How many users do you have? The frequency of lock contentions is directly related to the number of simultaneous users doing the same function or functions that require access to the same tables.
This may not be a bad thing - perhaps Dydacomp's programmers have realized there are a few more places where they need table and record locks to prevent data corruption.


--Randy

They now have their OWN Amazon order import/export module which is a $995 add-on.
Catch-22. If you were doing your own thing in addition to Sitelink, don't upgrade. But if you don't upgrade, good luck getting search engine visibility.

--Randy

Our client recently upgraded to SiteLink 5.0 and this, naturally, has now broken my program that pulled the SiteLink data for sending to their Amazon store.
First change was simple, but SO completely stupid - the data directory changed from sitelink/data to sitelink/sentdata. A completely MEANINGLESS change, why do something like this? Sorry, I write programs for a living and my clients would fire me if I did thing like Dydacomp so I get a bit incensed...
So I made that change in my program, figured everything would be OK now. But the client calls me back, shows me the screen - a bunch of gibberish. Pop into DBUWIN - GREAT, now they are encrypting the description fields. I found a message to this on Yahoo, the IDIOTIC excuse give was something about 'speeding up the upload.' RIGHT! The encrypted version is more than 2x the number of bytes as the plain text, so you'd need a better than 2:1 compression to even EQUAL the speed.

So - has anyone figured out the algorithm used here, so I can fix my program and get back on track?

This kind of thing is unconscionable. Oh wait, I'll bet Dydacomp has a $$$ add-on that shows me how to read the data, right?




--Randy

we are considering using rattle as it would provide some productivity to the number of reports we generally run.

v11 also has a way to password protect reports, which is a major improvement.

I've been working with R&R and RattlerR for another client (non-MOM) and while it does work fairly well, deployment is NOT for the inexperienced. You need to custom write ASP code for each report to deploy. Some combinations of parameter passing do not seem to work. All reports that HAVE parameters must be changed to use the RIPARAM() function - parameter fields will be ignored by RattlerR.
I was informed by the Liveware tech that helped me get started that there are some major improvements coming down the road which should make RattlerR much easier to use.

--Randy

It's strange that I found this forum and read this post today; I just was noticing that momwin.exe's memory usage climbed past 1 GB when I tried to run the Accounts > Receivable > Customer Statements report. It also brought the pagefile up to 1.3 GB.

Getting back to the terminal server / text problem:
We use MOM with TS (2k3 SBS) over the intranet and internet everyday and have never seen this problem.

Yup, now imagine there's 30 users on the system....

The text problem sounds like a possible video resolution conflict. I've done a lot of Terminal Server and Citrix installs, including running my own custom Foxpro apps on them, and never have seen that happen.

--Randy

Our company been using MOM (I unwillingly since the first day) for a few years.  As far as I can tell, the first person to set it up must have thought that spam email was the only way to find out about software, because I can only imagine that's how someone could be fooled into using MOM. 

From the very first time I saw the program, I thought "My God, I hope we don't actually use that!".  Unfortunately, we do, and I have been struggling to keep up with the data corruption and inconsistencies.  Sitelink was bad, so we moved our website away from that (stupid people had a hand in that too, so it didn't help much) but MOM has been the one of the worst nighmares we have dealt with in our 7 years of business. 

I would recommend you do NOT ever get yourself stuck in the rut that this program will certainly get you in. Your best bet would be to find someone who understands the Linux and open-source community, and who will find software which will suit your particular needs.

We cancelled our service contract because they refused to help us once when we had a problem, and they still try to send us bills.  That makes me laugh.  Some/one of the SiteLINK servers got hacked once (that I know of) and five of their sites, including ours, were defaced for about a day with something about the U.S. being terrorists, so that was fun.

I honestly don't know if the service has improved, but Foxpro (the underlying code upon which the MOM application is based) has a very poor API, so you are going to learn that it does not operate the way you are used to Windows working most of the time, and the rest of the time, does not work at all.  If you are going to try to do any Windows API automation using tools such as UNISYN's Automate software, forget it.  The Foxpro API does not have any recognizable handles which can be effectively used this way.

MOM has repeatedly proven unreliable and inconsistent for just about everything it is trusted to do, so if you're looking for a hellish nightmare which will certainly make you wish you had never tried to use it to run a business, then I say "Go for it".  Otherwise, you'd better look elsewhere.

If I were you, I would also stay away from anything built around Windows web servers too, such as the DotNET architecture.

Microsoft software is only trouble, as eBay has finally decided to admit: http://www.ecommerce...ory/39325.html) and it is what MOM and SiteLINK are built on.

If you're serious about saving money and getting some serious, reliable software/hardware handling your data, then search the Gentoo forums for someone who knows Linux, Open Source, and e-commerce.  Someone there should be able to help you find what you need.

Please. Visual Foxpro is probably the last truly good development package Microsoft has. No matter WHAT the application is written in, if the underlying database design is bad, the application will be bad.

I've recently installed MOM at our operation, and will be looking at this in the next few weeks.

I'll let you know how I make out with my own TS experimentation, and maybe we can compare notes.

-Ted

The only real problem we have with our client who is running MOM 5.1 through Terminal Server is that there is no way to restrict memory utilization - running large reports (their tables have grown quite large) causes Foxpro to load all temporary cursors into memory, since the TS server has 2GB RAM and this is what it sees as available memory. Running some of the more complex reports and then looking at Task Manager, you can see the MOM.EXE process for that user eating up a gig of RAM all by itself!
Pre-Visual Foxpro, FOxpro has configuration statements that would limit how much memory it saw, and would take care of problems like this. Visual Foxpro has dropped this. Anyone found a way around this? Back in the day, the problem was CPU load because of looping I/O in applications. TAME took care of that. Is there something like TAME that does for memory what TAME did for CPU?

--Randy

David,

I would very much like to see anything you may have in relation to Inventory reports. I have been attempting to create custom reports for a client with varying degrees of success, mostly due to the wierd (and otherwise complete lack of) proper relation keys in Dydacomp's database design. Quite frankly, if I did this sort of database design work for my own applications, my clients would have thrown me out on my rear. The only thing saving me so far is that I DO have plenty of experience developing applications in Foxpro, and it's a heck of a lot easier examining tables that way than via DBUWIN.

Thanks,
Randy

Sorry for piggybacking on this thread but I was wondering what the difference is between a report writer report name somereport.rrw and somereport.rrs?  It seems that the .rrw reports open up in design view why the .rrs are run when double clicked on.

Thanks,

.rrs files are scripts for the runtime engine. If you open one of the .rrs files up with Notepad you can see it references the .rrw file.

--Randy

I am also looking for a way to duplicate this report with the added functionality of a DAILY TOTAL - Why the standard report would not sum a DAILY total is beyond me. Running totals are fine, but would like to see the daily totals as well. Plus have the ability to generate a report BEFORE anything actually gets posted - a Trial Balance if you will.

I did sort of get the functionality I need by creating a report off the GLTRANS file, of course this is AFTER the posting has been made, but I can run a quick print of daily totals with or without each account code detail.

--Randy

We have built an application in VB.NET that translates the Amazon files into MOM orders for one of our clients. They have some odd naming conventions for size/color designations (our client), so there is a lot of crazy code to handle some of this that would not work for someone with a more organized SKU number system.
The biggets problem encountered so far is the Amazon is HORRIBLE at enforcing what common sense tells you are absolute MUSTS for commerce - they do NOT verify state entries, or zip codes. I see this all the time in the downloads, direct from Amazon. No consistency in state naming, missing ZIP codes, etc. I've been able to code around most of it, but it's still possible to get a state name that I haven't handled, resulting in a failure when MOM tries to import the resulting file, thus requiring someone to manually enter the order. It mostly works, but if Amazon could be a little more consistent (how about a simple 2-letter abbreviation dropdown on their order forms????? Or FULL state name, ANYTHING but free-form text entry by the customer!).

--Randy

In addition to a Sitelink store, we are selling on Amazon. Orders from Amazon get converted into a MOM-comaptible format which are then imported using the Order Import module. However, we are seeing problems where it appears to be doing a SOUNDEX lookup on the customer to determine if they are existing or new - Dydcaomp has taken oour files and not been able to replicate this problem, but what happens is that a genuine new customer gets their order attached to an existing customer who is similar in name, phonetically. I have been assured that there is "NO WAY" for this to happen, yet it does. The new customer on the imported order has a different street address, different name, but lives in the same city when this happens. Does anyone else use the Order Import function to load orders in quantity? Any help would be appreciated.

--Randy

Has anyone tried to create a report to do what would amount to a pre-settlement report? We are finding issues doing the A/R export where the totals do not balance and Quickbooks will not import. The problem is, you don't find out about this until AFTER the A/R is posted, and the existing report won't even show totals for each day, making troubleshooting a real pain. I contacted Dydacomp about this and they added me to a list of people asking for the enhancement of adding totals to the report.
I have also had them looking at WHY these days do not balance. Some are off by a few dollars, no big deal. But on at least one day, all the COG values were included on the credit side! This equates to a huge negative cost of goods, yet all looks at inventory items shows reasonable and accurate costs. Dydacomp has not been able to tell me where this bogus data comes from. I have been browsing files with DBUWIN until my eyes are crossed and don't see where these crazy values can be coming from.
Has anyone else been experiencing anything like this? Any suggestions? Help!

--Randy