Creating an LBI Smart Notification Series – Creating a Smart Notification (Part 2)

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LBI Smart Notifications are reports that are sent directly to users for reviewing vs a user logging into LBI to manually view a report. In this section we will first start off with an Intro to creating a Smart Notification. See Part 1 titled: “Creating an LBI Smart Notification Series – Creating an InfoSet (Part 1)”

 

  1. Login into LBI (admin permission required) >> go to Tools >> Select Smart Notification
  2. In Smart Notification, select Notifications at the top
    • If you have none, it’ll say No Selections (see screenshot), else you’ll notice a list of existing Notifications
  3. To create a new Smart Note, click Add

  4. Smart Notification Wizard will pop-up and starts at step 1 (Select Facts)

    • The Facts section is where you would connect the dataset (or InfoSet) to the notification (this can also be a document among varios other types of data).
    • An InfoSet is most commonly an SQL query or stored Proc that gathers data from a database.
  5. For this example, we will assume you have an InfoSet already created. View your InfoSets by clicking Search

  6. For our example we will be selecting the MonlthyVariance InfoSet and then select Range
  7. At the bottom of the next page choose Select >> Add >> Ok at the very bottom

  8. At the bottom under My Selections you should now see your InfoSet for step 1
  9. Now click Next or select step 2 Conditions
    • Conditions can be added with the Add button. This lets you tailor the data to your liking. This can also be done on the InfoSet side when writing a query or stored proc.
  10. Click Next again or select step 3 Delivery
    • Delivery typically is done through the Device tab which are setup email addresses in Smart Notes (See article titled “How to setup a LBI smart note delivery device”)
    • The Bursting tab is the alternate method. In the Bursting tab select the InfoSet, and the column to burst on which is typically a list of email addresses.
    • Schedule tab is similar to Device, except on a schedule which can be set elsewhere for the Notification.
  11. Click Next again or select Step 4 Related Info
    • Related Info lets you link other LBI reports, shared documents, deploy in a pre-made formatted template among other customizations. This may be covered in more depth in a future article.
  12. Click Next again or select Step 5 Save
    • This is where you Name, describe, set Home Page Group for your Notification.
    • You can also Preview, set Status, and add additional Permissions if needed.
  13. Click Save New Item to create your new notification and view it in the Notifications Tab.

 

Hope this was helpful! Good luck!

Creating an LBI Smart Notification Series – Creating an Info Set (Part 1)

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LBI Smart Notifications are reports that are sent directly to users for reviewing vs a user logging into LBI to manually view a report. In this section we will first start off with an Intro to creating an Info Set.

 

  1. Login into LBI (admin permission required) >> go to Tools >> Select Smart Notification
  2. In Smart Notification, select Admin at the top >> Work with InfoSets
  3. Click Add to start creating an InfoSet
  4. InfoSet Wizard should start >> Select the type of Info Set you want
    • Our example will be a Relational Database (JDBC) stored procedure with a predefined Data Source
  5. Click Next or go to Step 2 Define Info Set
    • In this section you will be defining your data depending on what type you select.
    • This data can include defining column data, number/string format etc.
  6. Click Next or go to Step 3 Specify Links
    • This section allows you to add file or class links which is dependent on your organization’s needs and what the notification will be used for.
  7. Click Next or go to Step 4 Save InfoSet
    • In this section you can add a Name, Description, set a group name.
    • Also allows you to add additional access, filter certain content, even categorize or limit the InfoSet.
  8. Once done with Step 4, click Save As New at the bottom to finish your InfoSet

 

That’s it! Smart Notifications and InfoSets have a lot of customizability, most of which aren’t necessary to get it going.

See Part 2 of this series titled “Creating an LBI Smart Notification Series – Creating a Smart Notification (Part 2)” to find out how to add this InfoSet to a new Notification report. Good luck!

Allowing company select in Requisition Center

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The default behavior of the shopping screen in RQC is to now allow users to select their Requesting Company.  To allow users to select the company, the rqc_config.xml file must be updated.  Navigate to LAWDIR/system and open the rqc_config.xml file in a text editor.  In the “client” section, update the setting “allow_company_select” to “true”.  Bounce the WebSphere application server for the change to take effect.

 

 

 

How to Get a List of Users from AD to Compare against Users in Lawson

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This process is going to assume you already know how to build a Lawson CSV report of users to compare against. LSA Report Maintenance has these report options available for this.

 

  1. Login into your windows machine and open Powershell as an Administrator.
  2. Type in this command: Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase “dc=domain,dc=local” | select Name,SID | Export-CSV
    1. dc=domain,dc=local will need to be updated to match your organizations.
    2. select Name,SID will extract the users Name in AD (typically First and Last Name) and their Security ID.
    3. Since we are doing this to compare against Lawson users (assuming you’re using SSOP), you want to also include the sAMAccountName, this is login name the users use to login into their windows machine.
    4. Export-CSV Requires a path after it including filename,
      • example: Export-CSV C:\ExportDirectory\ADUserList.csv
  3. For example, if you only wanted the Name and sAMAccountName use the command below:
    1. Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase “dc=Yourdomain,dc=Yourlocal” | select Name,sAMAccountName | Export-CSV C:\ExportDirectory\ADUserList.csv
      • NOTE: If you type dc=domain,dc=local incorrectly, Powershell will list the allowed partition(s), see screenshot below.
  4. If you only want Name and SID use the command below:
    1. Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase “dc=Yourdomain,dc=Yourlocal” | select Name,SID | Export-CSV C:\ExportDirectory\ADUserList.csv

You should now be able to acquire the CSV file in your C:\ExportDirectory\ that you outputted to.

Good luck!

How to get a list of specific program codes and screen descriptions in Lawson

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There are two common ways to get a list of program forms and their description from Lawson. One is through LID and another is through a database application like SQL Management Studio.

 

Method 1: The database application method requires your user to have at least database read access to the PROD or TEST Lawson database.

  1. Login to the PROD or TEST database through your database app (using SQL Management Studio for this example).
  2. Expand the PROD or TEST GEN database and expand the Tables folder:
  3. Scroll to the dbo.SCREEN table >> Right-click >> Select Top 1000 Rows
  4. For those not familiar with SQL, simply remove the TOP 1000 portion from the code to return all records in this table.

Change from this:

To this:

  1. Now click the Execute button:
  2. Select all returned records at the bottom by clicking the top left box:
  3. Right-click same box >> Copy with Headers
  4. Paste into Excel and filter as needed:

 

Method 2: The LID method is simpler if you have access to Lawson Interface Desktop

  1. Login into LID, your user will need access to rngdbdump
  2. Change directory to a safe directory to dump a file into.
  3. Type this command: rngdbdump -ct gen SCREEN > SCREEN.csv
    1. This command will dump out the SCREEN database table into a csv file in your current directory
  4. Go to that directory and open the csv file in Excel, filter down on the forms you want to view.

Good luck!

 

Program Error “netexpress not found”

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In a new install of Lawson, we recently had an issue running forms (inquire, previous, add, etc).  The program would hang and eventually show an IOS error message.  The job log said that lacobrts failed due to a timeout, but latm.log presented a more detailed error.

Thu Jun 17 18:55:55 2021: latm (jeeStartComponent): netexpress not found

Thu Jun 17 18:59:21 2021: latm: Monitoring turned on

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021: Timeout on opening application, removing application

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021: Pid=-1, Program Code=CU01  DataArea/DataID PROD       

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021: Possible causes: Insufficient NetExpress licenses or

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021:      not enough database users configured in ladb.cfg.

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021: latm (PrcTPCrash): Received death notification of lacobrts, Uid=-1, Pid=-1

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021:                  Program Code = CU01 , DataArea/DataID = PROD         

Thu Jun 17 19:01:16 2021: ERROR:    Exited with error code 0

 

The Microfocus COBOL licenses were definitely not an issue, so we started trying to track down the “netexpress not found” error.  Running “echo %COBDIR%” in LID revealed that the COBDIR environment variable was not pointing to the correct location.

This variable is set by the system, and is not something you can override in the Windows system environment variables.  After some troubleshooting, we discovered that the Lawson system value “LAUNCHER” was not correct.  We ran the command LaMgmtCmd -r <envname>, which showed the LAUNCHER value as “NetExpress”.  We compared this to another (healthy) environment that showed the LAUNCHER value as “run.exe”.

Some of these values can be modified using laconfig, but this specific value had to be updated using the update option on the LaMgmtCmd command.  First, we created an XML file with all the values (including the correct launcher), then ran LaMgmtCmd -u <envname> <filename>.

After the update, we rebooted the system, and ran lamgmtcmd -r <envname> to validate.

The value was correct, and we were able to start using the forms again.

Condition not found errors in blddbdict

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When running the blddbdict command after a patch or after using metaloadtable, the blddbdict command may fail with “condition not found” messages.  If this is the case, run the following commands to resolve the issue:

setsfl

setnotused <prodline>

blddbdict <prodline>