Friday, May 14, 2010

Speeding up SmartList Exports

Put SmartList on Hyperdrive! There is a dex.ini switch that has just been disclosed. Patrick has posted a great article about how he found it and how it works at the Developing for Dynamics blog. The article explains why SmartList exports are so slow and how to speed them up. Check out his article here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2010/05/14/smartlist-exports-slowly-to-excel-part-1.aspx

The switch is:

SmartlistEnhancedExcelExport=TRUE

It's a wonderful piece of information, thank you Patrick.

Until next post,

Leslie

7 comments:

davidf said...

Leslie,

I have found one problem with the setting. It doesn't render GBP currency correctly in Excel. Instead of £158.00 I get ú158.00. Works great for all my US users though!

DavidF.

Dynamics Confessor said...

Thanks David,

Does it work differently if you have the following switch in the Dex.ini file?

ExplorerFormatCurrency=FALSE

Leslie

davidf said...

The ExplorerFormatCurrency=FALSE switch strips out the formatting. While that's somewhat better than an unknown character, having to go back and add the currency formatting to the spreadsheet sort of negates the time savings of the export switch.

Just for grins, I tried TRUE instead of FALSE and got the " ú " character again.

neroxyr said...

Thanks, it speeds up by 10x but when I use this the date fields exported are with error because as my language is spanish the formula they use un excel is =DATE(yyyy,mm,dd) which in spanish excel es =FECHA so don't know if this only apply for english users. Thanks again

Dynamics Confessor said...

davidf,

Thanks for following up. This is an ini switch that is not documented or supported, looks like you found out why not. Sometimes it works, but there have been other issues with it. It works OK for text I guess.

Dynamics Confessor said...

neroxyr,

I don't know if it would make any difference, but there are a couple of dex.ini settings that control dates.

Before I get into that, does it matter if you change your computer's international settings so that it's using the US format?

Here's the .ini switches:

StdInternationalInfo=
This setting allows the operating system settings for date, time, and currency formatting to be overridden.

TRUE = Use Dexterity standard formats for date, time, and currency values mm/dd/yy.

FALSE = Use control panel settings for date, time, and currency values

StdInternationalInfoDateCentury=
This setting allows control over the year portion of the date values used by StdInternationalInfo

TRUE = Four digits will be used for the year portion of date values

FALSE = Two digits will be used for the year portion of date values

StdInternationalInfoDateZeroPrefix
This setting allows control over the date format for SdtInternationalInfo

TRUE = Single-digit day and month values will be prefixed with a 0 (zero)

FALSE = Single-digit day and month values will not be prefixed

Anonymous said...

I have found that it will also "shift" the data within your columns at the point of which it finds "blank" values......which is not a good thing at all. BE CAREFUL
Hope there is a workaround or fix for this because the speed is amazing.