hi all,

I want some AFS Documentations which help me for reading text file and importing to standard sessions.

Thanks
Yashwant

See the sticky threads at the start of this document. You can contact baan support for the latest documentation.

I'm developing api's using the 'developers guide for application function server (openworldx 2.5)' as a reference. Is there something newer?

I read a post referencing a 'stpapi.sort.by' call in an older thread that seems to work in my script but isn't in this document, which I thought was the latest. Are there other undocumented 'stpapi' functions out there such as this one, or do I need a more recent document? Searches on the Infor site keeps returning this document as the latest mentioning stpapi.

Instead of doing searchs on the support site I would contact them directly. I have heard about stpapi.sort.by, but have not seen documentation on it. I have only heard there is newer documentation, but I have not seen it(nor have I looked).

why do we use AFS?? what is the advantage. please provide some example

There are several advantages to using AFS, but automation is the best in my mind. The first that comes to my mind is to receive and store a part. So on our system they would basically print goods received, receive the part, print a receipt tag, run maintain approvals, inbound material. So I have two sessions that does all this for them. So for example the first session gets PO, Item, qty and lot info if needed. It determines which line to receive against, prints good received notes(again only if needed), then does the receipt for them and prints the receipt tags.

There other session checks it does for them, but that is the basics. The other program gets the receipt, po (looks up PO they do not have to type it in)and line, location and employee number(used to generate inbound). So looks of prestore checks get done for them - the location is looked up(they do not have to do that), it lets them know before the receival if anything is going on with that location(blocked, cycle count, etc.). Then they can manually change it. It does the maintain approvals, generate and release of inbound data.

Actually we could do it in one session if everything was source inspected, but as it is we use two sessions in the place of 7 or 8 sessions they would have to run manually. Plus now they only input 6 or 7 fields on the screens and do not have to worry about filling the correct fields or making sure flags are set correctly for reports. If I recall correctly we went from 1 or 2 full time people on the receiving dock running 3 days backlog - to having 2 parttime employees with 0 backlog.

Another good one was bin to bin transfers - at that time they would move stuff from main warehouse to floorstock using the inventory transfer session. I wrote one program to generate tags and one with AFS code. The AFS session would let them scan the item, part, qty, from and to warehouse - do the transfer for them. It would take them anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes for one transfer - we use a&d with pegging so that could possibly confuse them. With the two new sessions that could do 50 to 60 transfers in 10 minutes. It was amazing to watch them - scan, scan, process, scan, scan, process. Well a little more scanning, but the tag had the order I needed the info and a coded enter button.

Another advantage of AFS code is you can add front end checking to the process that the baan source code might not provide. We usually only did this on automation type sessions, but you could use it for that. I have another session that lets people create projects - but I have a permissions table in the back ground. This permission table only lets certain users create certain projects(example user a can only create projects that starts with K). Kind of silly, but that is how the users wanted it to control projects - plus I also generate the project number for them.

Then the final reason is to do mass loads. We have created several sessions where the user can generate an excel file with hundreds of transfers, or BOM's, or even garnishments. The user saves them as a .csv and the program does all the processing in the background. We use this for several system type interfaces. And again it usually is running multiple sessions in the background.