Customizing VisionCore

There are three major methods available for customizing or expanding the VisionCore application programmatically. These consist of the following:

•

You can develop a user interface add-in, or UI expansion. This adds a custom menu item or toolbar button to either the VisionCore main window or to a particular type of form. When the user selects the interface item that you have added, your code, which you develop using the VisionCore API, executes. For example, you might use the UI expansion to allow users to add a menu item to run specialized reports that are otherwise not available from the VisionCore user interface.

•

You can develop a business logic expansion or ICE expansion. This responds to the events of the inherited VisionCore objectsfor a wide array of VisionCore objects (such as bank deposits, customer accounts, journal entries, and vendor bills) and allows you to perform customized processing. For example, you could trap the RunPreSave event for a customer form to display a custom form that allows users to enter additional information about customers, which is important to a particular business, and then write this data to a separate database file.

•

You can take advantage of VisionCore's custom data storage features to store custom data in a company database, or you can store data in an external database in which individual rows in a table are related to particular VisionCore data objects. A solution that takes advantage of custom data storage facilities often is a user interface add-in or a business logic Expansion.

Your use of the VisionCore API is not limited to these customizations and extensions to the VisionCore application itself. In addition, you can use the VisionCore API to access VisionCore data from outside of the VisionCore application itself. For example, you could develop a custom solution, or access VisionCore data. The focus of this section, however, is customization and extension of the VisionCore application itself.

Provides a conceptual overview of UI add-in development. In addition, a later topic, How to: Create a UI Add-in, shows the steps that are involved in creating a UI add-in.

Provides a conceptual overview of developing business logic add-ins. In addition, a later topic, How to: Develop a Business Logic Add-In, shows the steps that are involved in creating a business logic add-in.How to: Develop a Business Logic Add-In

Explains how to use user fields to store custom data for account objects that is accessible both programmatically and through the user interface, how to use property bags to store data for account and document objects that is accessible programmatically, and how to supplement the VisionCore company database with a separate database containing custom information.

Often, there is a need to programmatically modify an application's basic configuration settings. This topic shows how to modify the properties that define the CompanyPreferences dialog, which allows many of VisionCore's configurable features to be changed through the user interface.

The reference document has information about the interfaces required to implement both UI expansions and business logic expansions, in addition to information about the entire ICE.