One of the most important and such a basic thing that I learned couple of hours ago is: How to update our Customization’s Forms/Reports Dictionaries? Silly, isn’t it? For I am supposedly a GP Consultant with 5 years of technical experience. But then, I do not mind admitting with my utmost honesty that, this is what I learned TODAY. And of course, I am contended that at least now I learned it…

I always version the Customizations that I develop, which will be relevant to that of the GP’s version. For instance, I alway start with 10.0.0 as my product’s version which is for GP 10.0. And it increases with every build, a feature addition and so on.

There is this customization which I am involved in for quite some time. And there is a report which is quite a complex stuff and the users always were so satisfied with their own trials with Report Writer and changing the format to their wishes.

Things were going on well till the users modified the report. From then on, whenever I install the next version, it would throw this error message (shown below):

I knew for sure that since I maintain a proper versioning, the Reports dictionary for my Customization product should be upgraded to the latest version which I install. But I didn’t know how. There are two approaches to tackle this:

Approach I:

1. Take a backup of both Custom Dictionary (previous version) and its Forms/Reports Dictionary.
2. Launch GP and open Customization Maintenance.
3. Export the report modifications to a package file.
4. Close GP and make sure all other users are logged out as well.
5. Delete the previous version Custom Dictionary and Forms/Reports Dictionary.
6. Copy the new version Custom Dictionary on to the GP Application Folder.
7. Launch GP and respond to the chunk installation message.
8. Open Customization Maintenance and import the Forms/Report Modifications that was exported from the previous version.
9. We are good to go.
10. Next time you start GP, you will not be prompted with this message.

Approach II:

1. Take a backup of both Custom Dictionary (previous version) and its Forms/Reports Dictionary.
2. Close GP and make sure that all other users are logged out as well.
3. Delete the previous version Custom dictionary.
4. Copy the new version on to GP Application folder.
5. Launch GP and respond to the chunk installation message.
6. Once the chunk is installed, we will be greeted with the above Forms/Reports Dictionary Upgrade message. Click on OK and don’t login to GP.
7. Now, open GP Utilities.
8. After all the routine checks (Version information, GP updates check, etc…), we will be left with the Additional Tasks wizard.
9. Now select “Update modified forms and reports” from the drop down, as shown below, and click on Process:

10. Select the launch file (Dynamics.set) from the application path from where GP is run, as shown below, and click on Next.

11. We will be listed with all the Products for which we need to upgrade the Forms/Reports Dictionaries. Select the product for which we are performing this upgrade, as shown below.