Friday, June 4, 2010

SmartList .ini switch Problems

What’s the switch?

SmartlistEnhancedExcelExport=TRUE

What’s the problem?

A client of mine was gracious enough to do some testing with this switch and discovered a couple of notable issues.

  1. Leading zeros are stripped from string fields when they are exported to Excel.
  2. The last digit of a string field is changed from a ‘2’ to a ‘0’. For instance:

Without Enhanced switch:

6055762161047502

Same record with Enhanced=TRUE

6055762161047500

I am not sure if it matters that there were two zeros in a row, but for now the switch is not usable for these types of fields. Using only numeric fields it is wonderful, but for string fields it seems to have issues. Like Patrick reminded us, it’s ‘undocumented’ for a reason.

Until next post!

Leslie

4 comments:

Doug Pitcher said...

I did this switch on a clients workstation and then found out they were using a 3rd party product called Excelerator. (Was used for the same type of thing. to speed up smartlist export). After making the dex.ini switch it blew up the 3rd party app.

I'd test this switch before you use it. That being said, I'm using it.

Dynamics Confessor said...

Doug,

Does the 3rd party product have any problems exporting string fields with leading zeros?

Leslie

David Musgrave said...

Hi Leslie

There usually is a reason for something being undocumented. If it had passed all the testing it would be released already. :-)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/developingfordynamicsgp/archive/2010/05/13/smartlist-exports-slowly-to-excel-part-1.aspx

David
http://blogs.msdn.com/DevelopingForDynamicsGP/

Dynamics Confessor said...

David,

Thank you for another fine link!

Perhaps we should start a list of features named 'Undocumented for a Reason'.

They are a gift if they work for what you need, but beware!

Leslie