Application types

Depending upon the type of application you’re developing, the development process you use will vary. Dexterity allows you to create two different types of applications:

Stand-alone applications are created by Dexterity developers who want to develop applications that are independent of any other application.
Integrating applications are created by Dexterity developers who want to integrate their business applications with Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Stand-alone applications

Although Dexterity was initially designed to create Microsoft Dynamics GP, you can use Dexterity to develop stand-alone applications. Many standard application features that are available to developers who create applications that integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP, such as security, pathname support and online help, must be developed separately for a stand-alone application. These development processes and other information about creating stand-alone applications are described in the Stand-alone Application Guide.

Integrating applications

The runtime engine included with Dexterity allows one or more dictionaries to function at the same time. This type of development environment is known as a multidictionary environment. If your application integrates with Microsoft Dynamics GP, this feature allows your application to share resources with the Microsoft Dynamics GP system and function simultaneously. If you’re developing a stand-alone application, other dictionaries may operate simultaneously with your application, but not share resources.

You can use many existing Dynamics.dic resources to add to the functionality of your own application. For instance, if you create a point-of-sale application, you can add fields from the Inventory Master Table directly to your application’s sales entry window, allowing users to view, manipulate and save item information to the Microsoft Dynamics GP table as well as your own. Developing your application in this manner lets you take advantage of existing information in the Microsoft Dynamics GP database and create a seamless integration.

Integration also means that your application can benefit from system features available in Microsoft Dynamics GP. For instance, system security allows users to control access to forms and reports in either the integrating dictionary or the Dynamics.dic dictionary. Customization tools allow users to modify forms and reports in the integrating dictionary.

In order to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics GP, your application’s resources must be developed directly in the Dynamics.dic dictionary. This allows you to use Dynamics.dic resources to help you create a seamless integration. To differentiate between your application and Microsoft Dynamics GP, the version of Dexterity you’ve received creates resources with resource IDs starting at 22,000. In contrast, all Microsoft Dynamics resources have resource IDs less than 20,000.

After you have finished developing your application, you will used Dexterity Utilities to “extract” your application from the Dynamics.dic dictionary. This extraction process doesn’t remove your resources from the dictionary, but instead makes copies. It is the extracted dictionary that you will package and send to your customers. This process is shown in the following illustration.