Microsoft Dynamics GP Adapter

This adapter simplifies the extraction of data from Microsoft Dynamics GP.

If you connect to a Dynamics GP database as a regular data source, you will have to apply and maintain selection rules on all tables because different companies are stored in separate databases. With TimeXtender Dynamics GP Adapter, you can select company accounts at a global level and apply only one set of selection rules. It is, however, also possible to overrule this behavior on a table by table basis.

To Add a Dynamics GP Adapter

Use the Dynamics GP Adapter to load data from separate Dynamics company account databases in a single table.

1. Open a business unit, right click Data Sources, click Adapter Data Sources and then click Add Dynamics GPAdapter.
2. Enter a name for the adapter.
3. In the Server name field, enter the location of the server where Dynamics GP resides.
4. In the Database field, enter the name of the database (this should be the DYNAMICS database).
5. Specify the authentication mode. The default setting is Windows authentication. If you choose SQL Server authentication, you are prompted for a user name and a password.
6. In the Command Timeout field, specify the number of seconds to wait before terminating the attempt to connect to the database. The recommended value is 0 to disable the timeout. In the Connection Timeout field, specify the number of seconds to wait before terminating the attempt to connect to the server.
7. If you want to add additional connection strings, click the Additional Connection Properties button. In the Connection String Properties window, type the preferred connection strings, and then click OK.
8. (Optional) Click Data Extraction Settings if you want to limit the objects brought into TimeXtender before the data selection stage. For more information, see Filtering What Objects to Extract.
9. The next window will be GP Company Table Setup. All settings should be left as default and click OK.

To Set Up Dynamics GP Companies

After you have added a Dynamics GP adapter and specified a provider, you will set up the accounts which represent the companies for which data will be extracted from the data source.

To set up accounts:

1. Right-click the adapter, and then choose Read Dynamics GP Companies. A dialog is displayed that shows all companies in the database.
2. In the Template list, select the company account you want to use as template for the table and column structure. If you are only selecting one company, then the template company must match the company that is selected.
3. Select Use to specify whether to retrieve data from the company.

To Load and Select Data from Dynamics GP Data Sources

1. Right-click the Dynamics GP Adapter from which you want to select data, and then select ReadObjects from Data Source. The Tables pane on the right displays all tables, fields, and views.
2. In the Tables pane, select the tables, fields, and views you want to extract to your staging database.
3. There are two ways of viewing the data: Alphabetical view, which displays all tables alphabetically, and Group view, where you specify how many tables each group must contain.
4. To view data in groups, enter the number of tables in each group in the Group view field, and then click Group view. You can then group the tables alphabetically or by specifying the number of tables you want in each group. To view data alphabetically, click Alphabetical view.

The tables and fields are displayed in the data source tree and in the staging database tree.