1. Backporting an e-Invoice Solution for GBS GmbH
    1. The Setting
    2. An e-Invoicing Solution
    3. The Problem
    4. The Headaches of Backporting Code
    5. MrWatson’s Tools to the rescue!
    6. A To-Do List Solution: Slack Canvas

Backporting an e-Invoice Solution for GBS GmbH

Backporting an e-Invoice Solution for GBS GmbH

Using MrWatson’s tools and above all the power of fmIDE

The Setting

The technical specification EN16931 has long prepared the path for electonic invoicing in the EU.At first there was a slow uptake from the commercial sector, but towards the end of 2024 in Germany at last the penny dropped…

electronic invoicing is really coming to Germany

…and quite imminently!

Moreover, the task ahead had just exploded, morphing

  • from the (relatively) simple task of receiving an electonic invoice
  • to the much more complicated task of generating and sending a valid electonic invoice.

An e-Invoicing Solution

At Günther Business Solutions GmbH we scrambled to master the situation - and managed to create a great solution in a couple of very intensive months’ consultation and programming. The solution we developed for the advanter ERP system was a two file module: one file for the code and one for the customer’s data.

The Problem

Whilst our prefered delivery method would have been to update all our customers to this new version of the software, there was a problem:

A handful of customers - about 15 - were stranded in old legacy versions of the software, requiring GBS to backport this new functionality into their old systems. 😕

The Headaches of Backporting Code

As you may know, backporting code into old databases is always a real headache. Databases evolve over time, and it is only natural that things get improved, renamed, extended, restructured. Importing or copy-pasting code between different versions of a database always leads to broken code, and we needed to minimise / eradicate this risk.

Whilst the files were designed to be modular, there was a still a rather large overhead of programming that was needed in the legacy systems to integrate these modules into the legacy framework.

The to do list included, amongst many other things

  • ensuring a clean programming environment
  • deploying the two new files to the customers server
  • integrating the two new files into advanter’s standard processes, inc.
    • file authorisation, account & window management, solution startup & shutdown, etc.
  • adding or updating code to support the new e-Invoice process:
    • custom functions, fields, value lists, layouts, scripts, …
    • settings fields for the e-Invoice process
    • new, normalised line item table to pre-process the data
    • modifying the invoice print script to construct the electronic invoice data as json and interact with the new e-Invoice module

In other words,

  • a lot of manual changes
  • in a lot of different systems

We needed to get efficient!

MrWatson’s Tools to the rescue!

MrWatson’s tools proved to be most useful in many aspects of this process!

Here is a list of the tools we used, and how they helped.

  • MrWatson’s fmWorkMate toolbox, with all its magic…
  • fmLaunchPad
    • to speed up te database launch process
    • and to make it easier for fmWorkMate to run in a separate FileMaker instance
  • Setup tools
    • fmSetupAssistant
      • to make sure that the FileMaker programming environment on the customers computer was setup correctly
    • fmKillDefaultFields
      • to make sure that the customer’s database was clean of default fields
    • fmSyntaxColorizer
      • to make sure that errors in scripts were immediately visible
  • fmCheckmate
    • to transfer code from our master database to the customer’s deployment
  • fmAutoMate
  • fmLogAnalyzer and the BugOff! Alarm
    • to catch pasting errors as we made them
    • and to turn the errors in a still-to-do list
  • fmCheckMate-XSLT library
    • primarily for layout analysis to check no pasting errors crept into customers’ layouts.
  • fmDBAnalyzer
    • for the specific task of checking the new TOs in the relationship graph.
  • fmTextDiff
    • to check how the customer’s code and our code differed

The tool, however, which really shone in this process wasfmIDE

A To-Do List Solution: Slack Canvas

For the ToDo list we had chosen to use the Slack Canvas functionality just released in our team software of choice, Slack.

Thanks to the brand spanking new Slack Canvas functionality in our team software of choice, Slack, it was relatively easy to build a comprehensive - but collapsible - to do list, that worked for everyone.

  • Slack Canvas to build a comprehensive & collapsible to do list