SDK Considerations ...

John, thank you the time you spent in providing this reply.

While I'm pretty sure I am ready to recommend purchase of the tool to our small company, there are a few straggling questions about specific projects we would perform. I'm not looking for "how to" answers, only whether or not anyone sees limitations in the SDK for doing these projects. The projects include:

(1) Tying "cost" of a sales order to an invoice for non-stock items (to be drop shipped to a customer). We are a manufacturer's representative; and, the cost on a sales order must be estimated before the factory builds the product we are selling (big, custom industrial boilers .... exciting stuff, eh?). Especially due to the wild fluctuations in the price of steel, we regularly see changes to the P.O.'s invoice associated with a particular Sales Order. However, we there is no tie between a purchase order's true cost to the company and the original Sales Order for our gross margin calculations associated with every deal. Can we programmatically fix this or will we encounter one of the few limitations of the SDK?

(2) Setting several fields as invisible by "role" within the company, since there are certain fields that should only be modified by particular individuals in the company, yet we still need to expose most properties of objects to people within specified roles (e.g. a Business Partner). No "role"-based setup exists in the system; so, do we have to perform this on a user-by-user basis? Regarding the visibility of certain controls, I "believe" this is accomplished by unsetting the "visible" property of form object widgets. Is this correct for SBO?

(3) Creating a process to allow us to handle a quirky drop ship factory order workflow from a specific vendor. We receive an order for a boiler from a customer. Create the sales order with this customer as the BP. From the sales order, we create a P.O. to the factory for the order. Then, "the factory" invoices the customer and collects payment, sending a commission to us. Therefore, the receivable to us is not from the actual customer, which we want to track in our bookings reports as from the factor. One would think we should then put the factory in as the BP for a Sales Order. That doesn't work since we need to be able to track who the customer is for our orders. We need to be able to go to a BP record and have the link to this sales order for future reference/work, e.g. future warranty opportunities, simply our knowledge of this order for this customer, etc.... We can't create a "wing" account under the factory's BP record for this customer since the customer may buy product from other factories in the future.

(4) Add vendor list price column (from a price list) to each item on a quote and sales order. This is "not" the cost to us or the customer, which are on other price lists. Add the customer's discount %, a calculation using this vendor list price and the sale price to each item on a quote and sales order. Then, we would also need this information for our quote templates that we would create for printing this information for customers.

Thank you in advance for any comments that might assist us in understanding if the SDK can handle these requirements!

Regards,

Scott Young